In 1999 the LEOS Board of Governors focused on encouraging students in their studies in electrical engineering. They established the LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship program to provide fellowships to outstanding LEOS student members pursuing graduate education within the LEOS field of interest (electro-optics, lasers, photonics, optics or closely related fields). Applicants are normally in their penultimate year of study and receive the award for their final year and must be LEOS student members. Recipients are apportioned geographically in approximate proportion to the numbers of student members in each of the main geographical regions (Americas, Europe/Mid-East/Africa, Asia/Pacific). There are 12 Fellows per year. Each LEOS Graduate Fellow receives $5000 and a travel grant of up to $2500 to attend the LEOS Annual Meeting to accept their award.
This year marks the fourth year of the LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship program, and LEOS is proud to present profiles of this year’s recipients. Each student submitted a nomination package to the LEOS Executive Office with the following information: (1) a nominating letter by a LEOS member. Where no LEOS members are able to support an application, the referees may consist of the Head of Department and one other full professor familiar with the applicant’s work; (2) a one-page statement of purpose by student describing her/his education and research interests and accomplishments; (3) the student’s IEEE member number; (4) a one-page biographical sketch of student,including all degrees received and dates; (5) one copy of student’s educational transcripts; (6) two reference letters from individuals familiar with the student’s research and educational credentials.
This year, nomination packages are due at the LEOS Executive Office by 30 May 2003, and recipients will be notified by 15 July 2003. The Fellowships will be presented at the LEOS Annual Meeting in October 2003. Please send completed package to:

IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student
Fellowship Program
445 Hoes Lane
Piscataway, NJ 08855

 

LEOS is proud to present profiles of our 2002 LEOS Graduate Student Fellows:

MATTHEW KENT EMSLEY received his Bachelors of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in December of 1996, a semester early. At Penn State, Mr. Emsley worked at the Applied Research Laboratory developing software to simulate the electromagnetic radiation generated by traveling currents in loop antenna; this work appears in D. H. Werner’s “Frontiers in Electromagnetics,” IEEE Press. 2000. He also worked for T. N. Jackson in the Center for Thin-Film Devices. After graduation, Mr. Emsley worked for T.B. Woods Corporation in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in Research and Development Engineering developing software control algorithms for AC motor drives.
In 1997, Mr. Emsley enrolled at Boston University, where he worked with Prof. S. Dunham in the VLSI Process Modeling lab (summer, 1998) and with Prof. M. S. Unlu in the Resonant Enhanced Cavity Photodetector group (since Fall, 1999). As a Semiconductor Research Corporation Intern at Intel Labs, he worked on gate oxide reliability for next-generation MOSFETs (summer, 1999). Mr. Emsley received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering in May 2000. His thesis is entitled “Reflecting Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) Substrates for Optoelectronic Applications.” He has co-authored two papers, two conference proceedings, and co-wrote a book chapter for the Encyclopedia of Telecommunications, Wiley, NY. Mr. Emsley has received the Electrical and Computer Engineering Chair Fellowship at Boston University, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Outstanding Graduate Teaching Fellow Award (1997-98), the H. J. Berman “Future of Light” Prize in Photonics for his poster entitled “Silicon Resonant-Cavity-Enhanced Photodetectors Using Reflecting Silicon on Insulator Substrates” at the 2001 Boston University Science Day, and a 2001 IEEE-LEOS Travel Award.
Mr. Emsley’s goal is to obtain a position in the field of optoelectronic and/or semiconductor design, fabrication, and integration, building upon his research work in device design, fabrication modeling, and device technology.
CRISTIANO DE MELLO GALLEP received the undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineer from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) in 1997. During the course term, he received a Certificate of Studies in Telecommunications and had worked for two years in scientific initiation projects in the Microwaves and Optic Department, DMO – FEEC -Unicamp. In the DMO he also obtained his Masters Degree (Aug./99), presenting the implementation and calibration of a simulator for semiconductor optical amplifiers with dynamically controlled gain, fitting and foreseeing results of the Feed-Forward Gain control technique. He is now completing his PhD on the subject of the optimization of sub-systems based on semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA). The goal of this research is to achieve a ten-fold reduction on the SOA electro-optical switching times, presented in the IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, July/2002. Mr. Gallep has published 4 articles in international magazines, one in a Brazilian magazine, six in international conferences (except two submitted in 2002) and another eleven articles in Brazilian conferences.
Besides optical telecommunication and its processing devices, his main academic interests are the photonic behavior of biological systems and the updating of the undergraduate education in electrical engineering. For starting researches in the first field, he participated in the two first summer schools on Biophotons, in the International Institute of Biophysics, Neuss-Germany. In the educational field, he participated as didactic assistant in an undergraduate course for two semesters and is now giving lectures (Fundamentals of Modern Physics) to undergraduate students, in the Didactic Apprenticeship Program (PED).
RONALD HOLZLOHNER obtained a MS degree in physics at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany in 1998. In 1995/96, he studied at the University of California Santa Barbara as a Fulbright exchange student. In the fall of 1998, he joined the PhD program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in Professor Curtis Menyuk’s research group, and expects to graduate in February 2003.
His research concerns the modeling of long-haul optical fiber communications systems, investigating the nonlinear light propagation and optimize system parameters. A special focus lies in the area of noise and receiver modeling. Within his PhD problem, he developed a covariance matrix method for computing accurate bit error rates that is much more computationally efficient than commonly used methods.
“My goal is to improve numerical modeling and scientific computing in the area of photonics, either in academia or in industry.”
JU HAN LEE received the B. S. degree in 1995, the M.S. in 1998, both in Electronics Engineering from Seoul National University, Republic of Korea. From 1999 to 2000, he was with Korea Venture Creative Investment (KVCi) Inc. as an analyst, where he was involved in analysis and investment on telecommunication technology. He joined the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at University of Southampton, United Kingdom in May 2000 and was a visiting researcher with the COM center at Technical University of Denmark, Denmark from July 2002 to September 2002. His research interest includes optical fiber amplifiers (EDFA, Raman Amp.), nonlinear all-optical switching, optical code division multiplexing (OCDM) systems, optical time division multiplexing (OTDM) systems, holey fiber, and nonlinear fiber optics. He has authored or co-authored up to 16 journal papers and 30 conference papers. Mr. Lee has been a student member of IEEE/LEOS since 1997.
Mr. Lee’s ultimate objective is to contribute to the advance of optical communication technology. After completion of his graduate studies, he plans to advance research and development in optical communication systems and devices at an institute or a company and writes that “This award will help me very much with respect to my personal economic situation and enable me to concentrate on study.”
CHARLOTTE MARRA received a Bachelor of Technology degree, with honours, from the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 1999. In early 2000 she started her PhD studies at the Photonics Research Laboratory, the University of Melbourne where she is researching novel designs and applications of fiber Bragg gratings and expects to graduate mid this year. She has been a student member of IEEE since 1997 and is currently the IEEE Melbourne University student branch secretary.
In particular her research is focusing on spectrally efficient DWDM fiber radio networks. She has designed and implemented a variety of novel gratings with appropriate spectral characteristics, necessary for the narrowband, multi channel optical filtering in these networks. This work will ultimately assist in fiber radio network deployment.
“After completing my thesis I intend to continue research in the field of photonics and plan to use the Award money to undertake some business management studies, which I see as an important addition to my scientific background”
MICHAEL MIELKE is in his final year of the optics PhD program at the School of Optics/ Center for Research & Education in Optics & Lasers (CREOL) and is a research assistant in the Ultrafast Photonics Group at the University of Central Florida (UCF). In collaboration with his advisor, Peter J. Delfyett, his research has shown that a single semiconductor laser can simultaneously emit up to 168 discrete WDM wavelengths for cost-effective photonic telecommunications. They have devised a technique for suppressing mode partition noise that delivers error-free pulses from multiwavelength modelocked lasers. This technique was published in Optics Letters, and for its development Mr. Mielke was selected a finalist in the 2002 Collegiate Inventors Competition.
Mr. Mielke utilizes his role as President of the LEOS Student Chapter at UCF to encourage student awareness of the value and benefits of professional service. During the past few years he regularly hosted tours of the CREOL laboratories, judged public school science fairs, presented optics and lasers seminars around UCF, and led the construction of ten educational optics demonstration projects. In addition to the LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship, he was recently awarded the Newport Corporation Exceptional Graduate Student Award in recognition of these endeavors.
“Receipt of the LEOS Fellowship is an honor, and it will help enable my progress toward chip-scale integration of multiwavelength semiconductor laser technology.”
PASCUAL MUNOZ earned an M. Sc. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, in Spain, in the fall of 1998. After a year working as IT consultant, he decided to come back to the university to pursue a Ph. D. degree in Telecommunication Engineering.
Mr. Munoz has been an IEEE Student Member since 1997. Nevertheless, since his Ph. D. subject is in the field of optics, related to arrayed waveguide grating design, modeling and applications, he joined the IEEE/LEOS Society. As a LEOS Student Member, he benefits from the free online access to the LEOS excellent research publications to support his daily work.
“The LEOS Graduate Fellowship has encouraged me to finish my Ph.D. and become a senior researcher in the field of electro-optics, and to get involved in the LEOS Spanish Chapter activities.”
MARCO PASSERINI was awarded his Laurea degree from University of Pavia (Pavia-Italy) in March 2000, with a dissertation on a new laser technique for remote surface angle measurement. Then, he spent 8 months at C.S.E.L.T. s.p.a. (now TelecomItaliaLab s.p.a.) in Turin (Italy) working on theoretical and experimental investigations of non-linear effects in fiber optic DWDM system. In November 2000 he entered a PhD course at University of Pavia with a project on semiconductor mode-locked laser for microwave generation. Since May 2001 he’s been a visiting Ph.D. student at Glasgow University (Glasgow-UK) involved in the design and fabrication of opto-electronic devices. In particular, the areas of research of his Ph.D. include the analysis of semiconductor mode-locked lasers for monolithic integration with microwave components. “The facilities in the Dept. of Electronics and Electrical Engineering of the University of Glasgow offer me a unique environment for the fabrication and characterisation of the designed devices.”
“The LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship will help me during my stay in Glasgow and allows me to work towards the achievement of an efficient integrated transmitter using a mode-locked laser as a RF carrier generator.”
MARC SCIAMANNA is working towards a PhD Thesis in the Electromagnetism and Telecommunication Department of Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium), as a Research Fellow of Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS, Belgium). His thesis is devoted to the study of nonlinear dynamics in a semiconductor laser when it is subject to optical feedback from a distant mirror, optical injection, or current modulation. In particular, he has focused on optical feedback from a short external cavity, since it may generate high frequency dynamics to be of interest for all optical signal handling. He also studied new polarization-switching phenomena in VCSELs, and found an interesting link between the dynamics of VCSELs with optical feedback and that of more generic systems such as those found in biology.
“The LEOS has largely contributed to the success of my thesis work. My first publication was in a LEOS Annual Meeting, leading to my first journal paper. I there met top-leading scientists, with who I am still pursuing great collaboration. It was a great honor for me to receive the 2002 LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award. The LEOS Award is an important mark of recognition of my academic and research accomplishments, which will no doubt enhance my prospects in pursuing a scientific career. A thesis requires a lot of abnegations, and the LEOS Award is one of the few signs made towards PhD students in order to motivate them to work for Science. In these hard times for telecom markets, the LEOS Award is also a great incentive for me to pursue a career in optics.”
MICHAEL B. VENDITTI received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from McGill University in Montreal, Canada in January, 2003. His graduate work involved the design of optical receivers and transmitters, and mixed-signal ASIC design for optoelectronic-VLSI applications. He has had academic experience as a Faculty Lecturer at McGill University teaching an undergraduate electronic circuits course. He also has gained experience in the industry during internships at Nortel Networks and Sanders, a Lockheed Martin company (now BAE Systems/TeraConnect Inc.), where he was involved in the design of free-space optical interconnects and optoelectronic-VLSI ASICs. He currently works as a mixed-signal design engineer for PMC-Sierra, Inc. in Montreal.
“I feel that being awarded a LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship is a recognition of the advancement of the field of optoelectronic-VLSI research. A key career goal of mine is to be involved in commercial applications of optoelectronic-VLSI technology at the chip-to-chip and intra-chip levels.”
SEBASTIAN WIECZOREK received a M.Sc. degree in Quantum Optics from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland in 1998. He recently defended his Ph.D., on dynamical complexity of semiconductor lasers with injection, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and just started working at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. His research interests are in complicated dynamics of semiconductor laser systems such as lasers with optical injection, lasers subject to external optical feedback, and coupled semiconductor lasers. In current investigations he combines state of the art bifurcation theory together with simple theoretical models in order to predict a variety of laser behavior and to reveal new nonlinear phenomena. The ultimate goal is to understand laser instabilities so they can be exploited in real applications.
Mr. Wieczorek’s objective for the future is to carry on in the field of laser dynamics. “The LEOS award will be very helpful in studying the dynamics of lasers side by side with experimentalist and in sustaining fruitful cooperation with colleagues working in remote places. Actually, the prestigious aspect of the award has already helped in getting my new job.”
LIANSHAN YAN received the B.E. degree in Optical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China, in 1994. Presently, he is pursuing his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) under the direction of Prof. Alan Willner.
From 1994 to 1999, he worked on solid-state lasers at North China Research Institute of Electro-optics, including high-power solid state lasers (average power >1000 W; peak power > 300 MW; repetition rate > 60 Hz), active and passive mode locked lasers used for laser ranging systems of satellites or accelerators, and phase conjugation technology to improve laser beam quality. After September 1999, he joined the Optical Communications Lab at USC. His main research interests involve the investigation of degrading effects and performance optimization in long-haul wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) optical networks. He studied the system impact in long distance transmission of polarization-related impairments, different data formats, dispersion management schemes, and nonlinear effects. For his research, he extensively used a recirculating fiber loop testbed. Starting in the summer of 2001, he also worked part-time for General Photonics as an optical engineer, concentrating on polarization-related sub-system module design.
Mr. Yan received the Graduate with Honor Award from Zhejiang University in 1994, and the First-Class Prize of the Ministry of Electronic Industry in science & technology development in China in 1996 for the project “High Power Solid State Lasers.” During his Ph.D. study, one of his publications received the Best Student Paper Award from the Department of Electrical Engineering at USC in 2002. He has also served as reviewer for several journals, including IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, Optics Letters, IEEE J. Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, and the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. Currently, he is the author or coauthor of more than 40 journals and conference papers, including two invited presentations and two OFC post-deadline papers. He also has 5 U.S. patents pending.
“Thanks to the LEOS society, this graduate fellowship award will help me to continue my study and research in the coming year and catch my dream - being a professional in the field of photonics.”