By: Eli Freund, Editorial Communications Manager, UConn School of Engineering
The UConn School of Engineering is pleased to announce that Dr. Bahram Javidi, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been awarded the prestigious OSA Emmett Leith Medal from The Optical Society (OSA).
According to OSA, the medal recognizes seminal contributions to the field of optical information processing. The medal was established in 2006 to honor Emmett N. Leith, a world-renowned scientist in holography and optical information processing.
Javidi was specifically chosen for this award “for exceptional innovation and transformative technological impact on the field information optics, including pioneering contributions to digital holography for life sciences, information security, optical sensing, and processing of photon starved scenes,” according to the award citation.
This award is the third accolade for Javidi from OSA in the past 3 years (he was also the recipient of the Joseph Fraunhofer Award / Robert M. Burley Prize in 2018, and C. E. K. Mees Medal in 2019), and is one of a long line of accomplishments during his career, which include: Being named one of the top 160 engineers between the ages of 30-45 by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to attend the Frontiers of Engineering; the IEEE Photonics Society William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, the Quantum Electronics and Optics Prize for Applied Aspects by the European Physical Society (EPS); the Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Wave Technologies from The International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE); the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for senior US Scientists in all disciplines; the SPIE Technology Achievement Award; the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award; and the George Washington University Distinguished Alumni Scholar Award.
At UConn, he has received the American Association for University Professors (AAUP) Research Excellence Award; the University of Connecticut Board Of Trustees Distinguished Professor Award; the UConn Alumni Association Excellence in Research Award; and the Chancellor’s Research Excellence Award, among others.
He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA), Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), Fellow of the European Optical Society (EOS), Fellow of The International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IoP), and Fellow of The Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). Javidi has over 1100 publications which have been cited 47000 times with h-index=101 according to Google Scholar and 30 patents, some of which have been licensed by industry.
Javidi is also the director of the MOSIS Lab [Multidimensional Optical Sensing and Imaging Systems (MOSIS.UConn.edu)], which is focused on advancing the science and technology of imaging, by centering on the fields of optics, photonics, and computational algorithms and systems, from nano to macro scales. MOSIS works with, and finds solutions for, partners in the defense, manufacturing, healthcare, and cybersecurity industries.
To learn more about the OSA Emmett Leith Medal from The Optical Society, please visit: https://www.osa.org/en-us/awards_and_grants/awards/award_description/leith/