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 30 September of the year in which the nomination is made. Candidates need not be members of the IEEE or LEOS. The deadline for nominations is 30 September.
The 2009 IEEE/LEOS Young Investigator Award will be presented to Aydogan Ozcan, “for his pioneering contributions to non-destructive nonlinear material characterization techniques, near-field and on-chip imaging and diagnostic system.” The presentation will take place during the Plenary Session held on 3 June at CLEO/IQEC - Conference on Laser and Electro-Optics and the International Quantum Electronics Conference, 31 May–5 June, Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Aydogan Ozcan received his Ph.D. degree at Stanford University Electrical Engineering Department in 2005. After a short post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University, he is appointed as a Research Faculty Member at Harvard Medical School, Wellman Center for Photomedicine in 2006. Dr. Ozcan joined UCLA in the summer of 2007, where he is currently leading the Bio- and Nano-Photonics Labo­ratory (http://innovate.ee.ucla.edu/) at the Electrical Engineering Department. Prof. Ozcan’s research group is also part of UCLA California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), where he is serving as a member of the research committee.
Dr. Ozcan holds 11 US patents, 1 UK patent and another 9 pending patent applications for his inventions in nanoscopy, wide-field imaging, nonlinear optics, fiber optics, and optical coherence tomography. All of his patents are currently licensed by Northrop Grumman Corporation, which is the leading defense company in US. Dr. Ozcan is also the ­co-author of more than 70 peer reviewed research articles in major scientific journals and conferences.
Dr. Ozcan is serving in the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation, and is a member of the program committee of SPIE Photonics West Conference. He also serves as a panelist and a reviewer for National Science Foundation and for Harvard-MIT Innovative Technology for Medicine Program.
For his work on lensfree on-chip imaging and diagnostic tools, Prof. Ozcan received the 2008 Okawa Foundation Research Award, given by the Okawa Foundation in Japan. Prof. Ozcan also received the 2009 IEEE Lasers & Electro-Optics Society’s (LEOS) Young Investigator Award. He is also the recipient of a National Science Foundation Award on “Biophotonics, Advanced Imaging, and Sensing for Human Health” for his on-chip plasmonic microscopy work. Dr. Ozcan was also awarded the Presidential Fellowship from the Turkish Ministry of Education in 1996 (declined).
Dr. Ozcan is a member of IEEE, LEOS, OSA, SPIE and BMES.