The Young Investigator Award was established to honor an individual who has made outstanding technical contributions to photonics (broadly defined) prior to his or her 35th birthday. Nominees must be under 35 years of age on September 30th of the year in which the nomination is made. Candidates need not be members of the IEEE or LEOS.

José Azaña received the Telecommunication Engineer degree (six years engineering program) and Ph.D. degree from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. He completed part of his Ph.D. research at the University of Toronto (Canada) and University of California, Davis (USA).
From September 2001 to mid 2003 he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). In 2003, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Montreal. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006. His research interests focus on fiber and integrated technologies for ultrafast optical signal processing and optical pulse shaping, for various applications, including optical telecommunications, ultrafast metrology, biomedical imaging and microwave waveform generation and manipulation. His research work has resulted in more than 150 publications in top scientific and engineering journals and leading conferences, including more than 80 publications in high-impact ISI journals and various (co-)invited presentations.
Prof. Azaña is a member of IEEE and OSA. He has served as a Guest Editor of the only two monographs entirely devoted to the emerging area of Optical Signal Processing, published by EURASIP Journal of Applied Signal Processing (2005) and IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology (2006). Prof. Azaña was awarded with the XXII national prize for the “best doctoral thesis in data networks” from the Association of Telecommunication Engineers of Spain (2002) and with the “extraordinary prize for the best doctoral thesis” from his former university, UPM (2003). He is also the recipient of two Strategic Projects grants (2004 and 2007 competitions) by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).