Society Awards for 2017

SPIE has announced the recipients of 12 of its annual awards for 2017, including the awarding of the SPIE Gold Medal to Katarina Svanberg, an SPIE Fellow who served as SPIE president in 2011.

The prestigious annual awards program honors technical achievements in optics and photonics and meritorious service to SPIE.

Svanberg, a professor, medical doctor, and chief oncology consultant at Lund University Hospital (Sweden), was honored for her biophotonics achievements, particularly in photodynamic therapy and tissue spectroscopy for cancer treatments and diagnostics. She was also recognized for inspiring young people across the world and for her dedication to building scientific and medical infrastructure in Africa and other developing areas of the world. Svanberg is also on the faculty of South China Normal University's Center for Optical and Electromagnetic Research.

The Society also announced the awarding of the 2017 Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award to molecular imaging pioneer Christopher Contag of Stanford and Michigan State Universities (USA) and the SPIE Technology Achievement Award to Edward J. Delp III of Purdue University (USA). 

The SPIE Awards Committee commended Contag for his invention of in vivo optical imaging using bioluminescent and fluorescent reporters, a technique that has significantly impacted the study of infection and living biology as well as the fields of oncology, regenerative medicine, and stem-cell biology.

Delp, an SPIE Fellow considered one of the founders of the field of multimedia security, is being honored for his pioneering work in that field, including watermarking and device forensics, and for his contributions to image and video compression.

Both Contag and Delp will receive their awards at SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco. The other awards will be presented at various SPIE meetings throughout the year.

Other SPIE award recipients for 2017 are listed below.

• SPIE Fellow Donis Flagello, president, CEO, and COO of the Nikon Research Center (USA) will receive the Frits Zernike Award for Microlithography at SPIE Advanced Lithography. He is honored for progress in the understanding and improvement of image formation in optical lithography for semiconductor manufacturing. 
• SPIE Fellow John Greivenkamp, professor of optical sciences and ophthalmology at University of Arizona (USA) will receive the SPIE Educator Award for his long dedication and passion to both formal and informal optics education, inspiring the next generation of optical engineers and other students.
• SPIE member Maiken H. Mikkelsen, the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Duke University (USA), will receive the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award, Academic, for outstanding contributions to the understanding of light-matter interactions and ultrafast emission dynamics in plasmonic systems.
• SPIE member Utkarsh Sharma, director of the advanced development team at Optovue (USA), is being recognized with the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award, Industry, for leadership and innovation, particularly in the successful commercialization of optical coherence tomography (OCT) angiography. SPIE will present Sharma's award during Photonics West 2017.
• SPIE Fellow Toyohiko Yatagai, the 2015 SPIE President and a professor at Utsunomiya University (Japan), will receive the 2017 SPIE Dennis Gabor Award for contributions to the development of computer-generated holography and related techniques for optical metrology, information processing, displays, and optical storage.
• SPIE member Christian Brosseau, Distinguished Professor of Physics at Universite de Brest (France), is being awarded the 2017 SPIE G.G. Stokes Award in recognition of his contributions to the theory of polarization of light, particularly for work on statistical optics, and polarization applications in optical information processing.
• The New Horizons Optical Instrumentation Team will receive the 2017 SPIE George W. Goddard Award for developing the innovative instruments that returned the first-ever images and data of Pluto and its moons, helping to better our understanding of distant worlds. The team was led by Southwest Research Institute and includes team members from the Alice, Ralph, and LORRI instruments.
• SPIE Fellow Mitsuo Takeda, a professor at Utsunomiya University (Japan), will receive the SPIE Chandra S. Vikram Award for the invention of the Fourier transform method of interferogram fringe analysis, achievements in coherence holography, and many industrial applications of 3D shape measurements.
• The late Mikhail Y. Schelev of the General Physics Institute (Russia) died just weeks after the SPIE Awards Committee voted to award him the Harold E. Edgerton Award. 

SPIE Professional will have more information on individual recipients in each of its four issues in 2017. In this issue, read more about these SPIE Awards for 2017:

• Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award
• SPIE Technology Achievement Award
• Frits Zernike Award for Microlithography
• Harold E. Edgerton Award

Members of the photonics community may nominate colleagues for a 2018 SPIE award to recognize their outstanding achievements. Nominations may be made through 1 October and are considered active for three years from the submission date.

More information on SPIE Awards.

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