The IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society has awarded the 1999 Quantum Electronics Award to Akira Hasegawa, “for his contributions to the derivation of the master equation for signal transmission in fibers, discovery of optical solitions and the theoretical developments for application of solitons to all optical high speed communication systems”. LEOS President, Hans Melchior presented the award at the Plenary Session of the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) in Baltimore, MD.
Dr. Akira Hasegawa obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Osaka University. He became a Fulbright exchange scholar and received his Ph.D degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. He also received the degree of Doctor of Science from Nagoya University in 1967. He was an Associate Professor of Osaka University from 1964 until he joined Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey in 1968. After serving as a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, he returned to the Osaka University as a Professor of Communication Engineering in 1991. Dr. Hasegawa has been active in the area of plasma physics, space physics, nonlinear optics and fluid dynamics. He currently holds a joint appointment at Kochi University of Technology and NTT Science and Core Technology Laboratory Group.
Dr. Hasegawa is a recipient of 1991 Rank Prize and 1995 C&C Prize. He is a fellow of American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He is also a member of Physical Society of Japan, Sigma Xi, and America Geophysical Union. From 1978 to 1990 he served as member of the executive committee as well as the vice-chairman and the chairman of the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics. He also served on a number of review committees, planning committees, and proposal evaluation committees for DOE, NASA and NSF.
The Quantum Electronics Award is the most prestigious award given by the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society and is presented annually to honor an individual or group of individuals for outstanding technical contributions to quantum electronics, either in fundamentals or applications, or both. The award may be for a single contribution or for a distinguished series of contributions over a long period of time. It consists of a bronze medal and an honorarium of $2,000. This year’s Awards Committee consisted of Thomas G. Giallorenzi, Chair (Naval Research Laboratory), Joe Campbell (University of Texas), Alastair Glass (Lucent Technologies), Erich Ippen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Takeshi Kamiya (The University of Tokyo), and Steve Harris (Stanford University).