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eLight co-Editor-in-Chief, Aydogan Ozcan, Wins Prestigious Optical Engineering Prize!

Release Date: 2 March 2022

Aydogan Ozcan, who serves as the co-Editor-in-Chief of eLight has received the prestigious 2022 Joseph Fraunhofer Award and Robert M. Burley Prize for optical engineering. Ozcan holds the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Innovation at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and is an HHMI Professor with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The annual award by one of the leading optical societies, Optica, recognizes significant accomplishments in the fields of optical engineering and photonics since its inception in 1982.

Ozcan’s research focuses on computational imaging and optical sensing, targeting biomedical applications. He recently published his research on a biomedical imaging technique that could be used to inspect and diagnose skin tumors without the need for invasive biopsies or tissue staining.

Since 2007, Ozcan has been a member of the faculty at UCLA before becoming a Chancellor’s Professor of electrical and computer engineering in 2013. He also holds a faculty appointment in bioengineering and is an Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. Ozcan has received numerous international honors for his research, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, International Commission for Optics (ICO) Prize, SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award, Rahmi M. Koc Science Medal, IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award and Distinguished Lecturer Award, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award, National Academy of Engineering The Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Award and MIT’s TR35 Award for his seminal contributions to computational imaging, sensing and diagnostics. Dr. Ozcan is also listed as a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science, and is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He holds more than 50 issued patents for inventions in various fields, including mobile health, nanoscopy, and holography.

Formerly known as the Optical Society (OSA), Optica will honor Ozcan at its annual conference, Frontiers in Optics, on Oct. 16-20 in New York City.

Prof. Ozcan is the founding co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal eLight, which aims to attract the finest manuscripts, broadly covering all subfields of optics, photonics, and electromagnetics. In particular, it focuses on emerging topics and cross-disciplinary research related to optics & photonics. Launched in last june, eLight’s papers in 2021 are highly visible with an average download of 5,000 times and citation of 16 times per paper.