Dr. Michal Lipson, Eugene Higgins Professor at Columbia University, has been elected members of The Optical Society (OSA) to serve as the society’s 2021 Vice President. Lipson’s four-year commitment to OSA’s Board of Directors consists of serving one year as vice president in 2021, followed by one year as president-elect in 2022, president in 2023 and past president in 2024.
“In the field of silicon photonics, Lipson is a pioneer whose work in tailoring the electro-optic properties of silicon and advancing research and development is world-renowned,” said OSA CEO Elizabeth Rogan. “Her contributions to OSA and the optics and photonics community have been extraordinary and the society will continue to benefit from her serving in this key leadership role.”
Dr. Lipson pioneered critical building blocks in the field of silicon photonics, which today is recognized as one of the most promising directions for solving the major bottlenecks in microelectronics. In 2004, she showed the ability to tailor the electro-optic properties of silicon (Almeida, et al., Nature 2004 with more than 1300 citations and Xu et al Nature 2005 with more than 2000 citations) which represented critical advances that led to the explosion of silicon photonics research and development. The number of publications related to silicon photonic devices and systems is now more than 50,000 a year. Many of these publications are based on Lipson’s original papers published since 2001.
OSA members also elected two directors-at-large to serve on the OSA Board of Directors for the 2021-2023 term:
- Dr. Joyce Poon is a Director of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Toronto, Canada and an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. She and her team specialize in integrated photonics on silicon. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for Optics Express. Poon founded the OSA Student Chapter at the California Institute of Technology, USA where she earned her Ph.D. She subsequently built a research program centered on silicon integrated photonics for telecom applications at the University of Toronto, Canada.
- Dr. Ulrike Woggon is Professor of Experimental Physics, in particular Nonlinear Optics, at the Institute for Optics and Atomic Physics of the Technical University Berlin (TUB). In 1985, she received her Ph.D. from Humboldt University in the field of nonlinear optics in semiconductors. Her research interests, documented by more than 200 refereed publications and approximately 7,500 citations, several book chapters and numerous invited lectures as well as third-party funding, are in the field of nanophotonics, ultrafast spectroscopy, solid-state optics and photonic materials. Woggon is one of the founding members of the Berlin School of Optical Sciences and Quantum Technology (BOS.QT). She became an OSA Fellow in 2010, and has served as chair or member on several OSA program committees.
Lipson and the new directors-at-large will begin their terms on 1 January 2021.