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.
LEOS is proud to present profiles of our 2006 LEOS Graduate Student Fellows:

IOANNIS CHREMMOS received the Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2002, ranking first among his colleagues and achieving the highest grade in all Departments of NTUA for 2002. He has been awarded annual fellowships and distinction awards from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation and the Greek Technical Chamber in every year of his undergraduate studies. He is currently working towards the Ph. D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Microwave and Fiber Optics Laboratory at the NTUA, under the supervision of Prof. N. Uzunoglu. His work focuses on the rigorous EM modeling of novel optical and microwave devices, involving the coupling of optical waveguides with resonant dielectric cavities. He has been especially involved in the integral equation modeling of “whispering gallery” resonators, coupled-resonator optical waveguides (CROWs), photonic crystal fibers and couplers and the study of so far unsolved EM problems such as the coupling of non-parallel optical fibers.
For his doctoral studies, Mr. Chremmos has been awarded successive fellowships from the “Eugenidion Foundation”, the “Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation” and the “D. Chorafas Foundation”. He is the author of 11 scientific papers, published in major journals, including IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters and the Journal of the Optical Society of America A. He has also authored papers for 5 international conferences and served as a reviewer for IEEE Photonics Technology Letters and Optics Express.
“It is a great honor to receive the IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship 2006. My doctoral work focuses on analytical techniques in EM theory. This field is considered classic and it is difficult for researchers working in it to be innovative. The international IEEE/LEOS Award is certainly a major recognition of the originality and importance of this research, which was carried out under the supervision and support of Prof. N. Uzunoglu. This distinction is a critical encouragement that will help me to further pursue my scientific interests.”

NING DENG received the B.Eng. degree in Electronics Engineering and Information Science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2002. During his undergraduate study, he participated in the Undergraduate Research Program of USTC and won the Best R&D Project Award. He served as a summer intern in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2001.
He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree under Prof. Calvin C. K. Chan and Prof. Chinlon Lin, in the Department of Information Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). His research field is optical communication systems and networks. His recent research interests and involved projects include optical modulation formats, optical broadband access networks, packet switching networks, and all-optical signal processing. He has published around 20 technical papers in international journals and conferences such as PTL, JSTQE, OL, EL, OFC, ECOC. He is an active reviewer for IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.
In addition to the 2006 IEEE LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship, Ning received the Best Paper Award Champion in the 7th IEEE Hong Kong Section LEOS Postgraduate Conference, and the Student Travel Award for the CLEO Pacific Rim Conference 2003. Thus he would like to take the chance to express his heartfelt gratitude to IEEE LEOS for the great support to graduate students in their research work. Besides, Ning also did very well as a teaching assistant and was honored with the Outstanding Teaching Assistant by the Department of Information Engineering of CUHK.

ZHIBING GE was born in 1979 in Suzhou, China. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China and University of Central Florida (UCF), Orlando, USA in 2002 and 2004, respectively.
Currently, Zhibing is working towards his Ph.D. degree at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando. His Ph.D. study concentrates in the area of modeling liquid crystal display and photonic devices. From 2003 to 2005, he participated in the display project for Toppoly Optoelectronics Corp., Taiwan, on developing new transflective liquid crystal displays for small panel devices, and high transmittance in-plane switching mode for LCD TV and monitor applications. Since April 2006, he has been working on novel liquid crystal display development project contracted by Chi-Mei Optoelectronics Corp., Taiwan. Meanwhile, he is also a lead student for developing dynamic modeling tools of liquid crystal based spatial light modulators for Raytheon Company, Boston, MA.
Zhibing also participates actively in academic services. He is currently serving as Chair of Society of Information Display UCF Student Branch. He is also a reviewer for IEEE/OSA Journal of Display Technology, Applied Physics Letter.
He is one of the recipients of the 2006 IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowships. In addition, he also received the “Meritorious” Award of American Mathematical Contest in Modeling in 2001. He would thank IEEE/LEOS for giving him this great honor, and acknowledge his advisors Prof. Shin-Tson Wu and Prof. Thomas X. Wu at UCF for their dedicated mentoring.

GEORGIOS KALOGERAKIS received his B.E. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 2001. He received the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, in 2003. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Leonid Kazovsky at Stanford University.
Georgios’ PhD thesis focuses on fiber nonlinearity, fiber optical parametric amplifiers and wavelength converters for next-generation optical networks. He has demonstrated key features of these fiber-based devices, such as WDM signal amplification and band conversion for dense WDM signals, distributed parametric amplification, multiple wavelength conversion, and polarization independent operation based on polarization diversity in a fiber loop configuration.
He has been author or co-author of over 30 refereed journal articles and conference papers. He also serves as an active reviewer for IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, Optics Letters, and Optics Express.
He was a Stanford Graduate Fellow from 2001 to 2004. He is one of the recipients of the IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award in 2006.
“It is a great honor to receive the IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award. This recognition is a strong encouragement to work towards the completion of my Ph.D. research and actively pursue a future career in the field.

JUNG-WON KIM received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1999, and the S.M. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA in 2004, where he is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in the same field.
From 1999 to 2002, he worked as a development engineer at FiberPro, Daejeon, Korea, where he developed the world’s fastest polarization-dependent loss measurement system. From 2002, he has worked on ultrahigh-precision ultrafast optoelectronics at MIT. His current research interests are focused on ultralow-noise femtosecond laser sources and their applications in coherent optical/microwave signal synthesis, optoelectronic phase-locked loops, photonic analog-to-digital converters, large-scale optical timing distribution for next generation light sources, and extreme light-matter interactions on a sub-optical-cycle time scale.
Mr. Kim was the sliver medalist of the 26th International Chemistry Olympiad, Oslo, Norway (1994), and received the President’s Award from Seoul National University (1999), the Photonics Conference 2001 Best Paper Award (2001), the Morris Joseph Levin Award from MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science for the outstanding master thesis presentation (2004), and the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) Graduate Fellowship Award (2006).

ZETIAN MI received the B.Sc. degree in Physics from Beijing University, China in 1997 and the MS degree in Physics from the University of Iowa in 2001. From 2001 to 2003, he had been with Picometrix, working on the development of high-speed photoreceivers. In 2003, he started Ph.D. in Applied Physics at the University of Michigan. His research interests are in the areas of self-organized nanostructures and their applications in nanophotonics and nanoelectronics. He has demonstrated the first semiconductor lasers that exhibit temperature invariant operation, the first tunnel injection 1.3 µm quantum dot lasers that exhibit zero a-parameter, the first 1.5 µm metamorphic quantum dot lasers on GaAs with the lowest threshold current ever reported, and the first room-temperature InGaAs quantum dot lasers monolithically grown on Si. He is an author or coauthor of over 50 journal articles and conference papers. Recently, he has received the Outstanding Student Paper Award at the 23rd North American Conference on Molecular Beam Epitaxy, the First Place Best Student Poster Award at the 1st Nano-Optoelectronic Workshop in Berkeley, the Third Place Best Student Poster Award at the 2nd Nano-Optoelectronic Workshop in Berkeley, and the 2006 IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award.

SUDHA MOKKAPATI was born in Hyderabad, India in 1977. She received Bachelors degree in Science from Osmania University in 1995 and Masters degree in Science in1999 and Technology in 2001 from University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad and Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur respectively.
She is currently working towards her Ph.D. with the Semiconductor Optoelectronic and Nanotechnology group at The Australian National University. Her research activities are in the area of MOCVD grown quantum dot semiconductor lasers based on InGaAs/GaAs system and aims at demonstrating novel quantum dot devices.
I’m greatly honoured to receive the IEEE/LEOS graduate student fellowship-2006. I would like to thank my supervisors Dr. H. H. Tan and Prof. C. Jagadish for their constant support and valuable guidance. It was a rewarding experience to be at the LEOS annual meeting to meet high profile scientists and researchers from all over the world. It would not have been possible without the financial support from LEOS.

LAZARO AURELIO PADILHA, JR.was born in Socorro, in Sao Paulo State in Brazil, on February 18, 1980. He received B. S. degrees in Physics Universidade Estadual de Campinas, in Brazil in 2001. In 2002, he joined the Ultrafast Phenomena Group at the Physics Institute at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, where he had been a PhD student until 2006 when he graduated. During his graduation, Lazaro spent one year as a Visiting Student at the Nonlinear Optics Group at CREOL at University of Central Florida, in Orlando, FL. Currently, he is a Research Scientist at this same group at CREOL. His research work is in the area of linear and nonlinear optical properties in quantum confined materials, especially semiconductor quantum dots. Optical properties of semiconductor can be controlled by controlling the size and size distribution of the quantum dots. In his PhD he studied the influence of quantum confinement on the optical properties of semiconductors. He is a member of OSA, SPIE, and IEEE-LEOS.
“I am honored to receive one of the 2006 IEEE LEOS Graduate Student Fellowships, which is an important achievement in my carrier. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my Ph. D thesis advisors, Prof. Carlos H. Brito Cruz, at Universidade Estadual de Campinas, and Prof. Eric Van Stryland and Prof. David Hagan, at CREOL – University of Central Florida, for their his patient guidance and for providing creativity, mentoring, and the vision behind our work.”

DOMINIK PUDO was born in 1980 in Warsaw, Poland. He received the B.Eng degree in electrical engineering from McGill University, Montreal, Canada in 2003, and is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree at the same university under the supervision of Prof. Lawrence Chen. From 2001 till 2003, he was an undergraduate research assistant in the Photonic Systems Group at McGill, working on novel configurations of multiple-wavelength, mode-locked fiber lasers as well as on erbium-doped fiber amplifiers. His research was highlighted in WDM Solutions in June 2002, and a year later he was the co-recipient of the IEEE Life Member Award for the best student paper in Eastern Canada. Since 2003, his graduate research work, supported by the prestigious Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) doctoral scholarship, focuses on the limitations and applications of the temporal Talbot effect within the context of pulse repetition rate multiplication. Mr. Pudo was also granted a Canadian Institute for Photonic Innovations (CIPI) fellowship to spend 4 months at the Centre for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems in Sydney, Australia in 2005-2006. During his stay, he worked on long period gratings and photo-induced effects in chalcogenide fibers. He has published a dozen journal papers and conference proceeding articles, and he currently owns one provisional patent. Mr.Pudo is a student member of IEEE-LEOS and the Optical Society of America.

JUAN JOSE VEGAS OLMOS (S’ 04) was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1978. He received the B.Sc. degree in telecommunications engineering and the M.Sc. degree in electronics engineering from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, in 2001 and 2003, respectively. He also received the Licenciature in Business Administration from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in 2005.
In 2003 he joined the COBRA Research Institute, Eindhoven University of Technology, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree. From 2003 to 2005 he participated in the European project STOLAS (Switching Technologies for Optically Labeled Signals). Once the project concluded, he joined the European project LASAGNE (All-optical LAbel SwApping employing optical logic Gates in NEtwork nodes).
His field of interest includes all-optical switching, labeling techniques, applications of the semiconductors amplifiers, radio-over-fiber systems for access networks.

NENAD VUKMIROVIC (S’05) was born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1980. He received the B.Sc. degree in physics in 2003, and the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering in 2004, both from the University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia. Since October 2004, he has been pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the Institute of Microwaves and Photonics, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K., in the field of theory, design and modeling of quantum-dot intraband optoelectronic devices. His research interests range from the fundamental aspects of the electronic, optical and transport properties of quantum nanostructures to their application in devices such as quantum dot infrared photodetectors, quantum cascade lasers and optically pumped lasers.
He has been author or co-author of over 20 peer-reviewed journal papers. He also serves as an active reviewer for several journals including IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, Nanotechnology, Physical Review B, and Physical Review Letters.
As a high school student, Mr. Vukmirovic¢ won the gold medal at the 30th International Physics Olympiad, Padua, Italy in 1999. He is the recipient of the Overseas Research Students (ORS) award, which funds his PhD studies, the IEE Leslie H Paddle Fellowship in 2005, and the 2006 IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship.

PHILIP WATTS was born in Yorkshire, United Kingdom in 1970. He obtained the BSc in Applied Physics from the University of Nottingham, with 1st class honours, in 1991. From 1991 to 2000, he worked at the GEC-Marconi Research Centre (Chelmsford, UK) on the development of optical systems for defence and aerospace applications including diode pumped lasers, coherent and direct detection LIDAR and adaptive optics. From 2000, he was senior optical hardware engineer with Nortel Networks (Harlow, UK and Ottawa, Canada) with responsibility for next generation DWDM optical multiplexer product development. On leaving Nortel in 2002, and having a strong interest in signal processing for optical systems, he decided to pursue academic research in this area. He studied for the Masters degree in Technologies for Broadband Communications at University College London (UCL), graduating with Distinction in 2003, with a thesis on the electronic compensation of fibre chromatic dispersion for optical single sideband (OSSB) signals. In September 2003, he was awarded a UK EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) PhD scholarship to continue this research with the Optical Networks Group at UCL.
During the PhD work, several techniques for overcoming fibre chromatic dispersion using electronic signal processing have been studied, including feed-forward and decision-feedback equalization and electronic predistortion (EPD) as well as continued work on OSSB transmission. His current work is aimed at the implementation of a programmable 10 Gb/s optical transmitter, with real time digital signal processing using field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology, allowing the experimental generation of both OSSB and EPD signals.
His work has been published in 15 journal and conference papers, including invited papers at major conferences, and there has been widespread interest from industry, leading to collaborations with Intel Research and Azea Networks. Philip spent two short internships at Intel Research during 2004 and 2005, applying the signal processing techniques developed in his research to short distance optical interconnect problems. In addition to research, he teaches on the Masters programmes at UCL, including lecturing on microwave active devices and SDH/SONET and access optical networks. He is married with a one-year old son.
“It is a great honour to receive one of the 2006 IEEE LEOS Graduate Student Fellowships. This award will help me to further pursue my research ideas in this field. I would like to thank my PhD supervisors, Dr Robert Killey, and Professor Polina Bayvel for their support and for creating an excellent research environment.”