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 sixth 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 2005, and recipients will be notified by 15 July 2005. The Fellowships will be presented at the LEOS Annual Meeting in October 2005. Please send completed package to:

IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Program
445 Hoes Lane
Piscataway, NJ 08854

LEOS is proud to present profiles of our 2004 LEOS Graduate Student Fellows:

MUZAMMIL ARAIN (SM’1997) earned his B. Engg. in Electrical Engineering from the N.E.D. University of Engineering & Technology, Karachi, Pakistan in 1998. He was subsequently employed as Electrical Power Engineer first at National Refinery Limited and the Hub Power Company Limited, Pakistan.
He joined the Photonics Information Processing Systems (PIPS) Lab at College of Optics/CREOL, University of Central Florida in Fall 2001. He received his M.S. in Optics (Summer 2002) and continued as a Doctoral candidate under Prof. Nabeel A. Riza. His research is focused on innovative use of interference phenomenon in the field of photonic information processing and optical communications. He has demonstrated a novel holography based optical scanner called Code Multiplexed Optical Scanner (C-MOS) to be used in free space laser-communication and 3-D display technology. He has also worked on the implementation of RF transversal filters in optical domain and angstrom precision optical path length measurement instruments using interferometric based opto-electronic techniques. He is currently pursuing active research in optical sensors.
Muzammil Arain has actively published and presented his work in a number of distinguished journals and conference. He has earned a number of competitive awards and honors for his professional and extra-curricular excellence along the way. He was recognized by the Government of Pakistan in the form of a President Talent Scholarship Award (1989) and University Merit Scholarship from N.E.D. University (1994). More recently, he is the recipient of the of 2004 SPIE Educational Scholarship along with the prestigious 2004 IEEE LEOS Graduate Fellowship.
“IEEE LEOS Fellowship is a major career achievement for me. It is also recognition of the innovative and exciting research being done here at PIPS lab at CREOL by our research group under Prof. Nabeel A. Riza. A major credit for my success goes to my parents and family for their continuous prayers and encouragement throughout my life.”

DAVID DAHAN received the engineer’s diploma in electrical engineering from Supélec, Paris, France in July 1999 and the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA in December 1999.
In March 2000, he joined the optical communication laboratory at the Technion, Israel as a scientific researcher within the framework of French national service. He worked on a European IST project, METEOR (Metropolitan Terabit Optical Ring) whose aim is to design, develop a tera-bit optical metropolitan area network realized as an optical ring with 40 DWDM channels operating at bit-rates up to 40 Gbit/s.
He carried out work on several topics, including modeling of high speed (40Gbit/s) WDM (40 channels) transmission, in particular studying the impact of modulation formats, nonlinearities, chromatic and polarization mode dispersions. He also realized the modeling of ring networks. In addition, he has been involved in both theoretical and experimental work related to timing recovery at high bit rates for RZ and NRZ formats.
In August 2001, he started a PhD degree in electrical engineering under the supervision of Prof. Gadi Eisenstein at the Technion, Israel. His research deals with theoretical and experimental aspects of Raman and parametric based amplification and all optical processing. Special emphasis is put on noise issues in the saturation regime. His research interests include noise analysis in saturated Raman fiber amplifiers, wavelength converters and reshapers, optical pulse sources based on optical parametric amplifiers and self starting oscillators.
He received a fellowship of excellence from the Israel Ministry of Science in both 2003 and 2004. He is author and co-author of 20 journal and conference papers, almost all in the IEEE journals and the main international conferences like OFC and ECOC. He is also a reviewer for IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, IEEE Photonics Letters and JOSA B.
“Receiving the LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship is a real great honor. I consider this prestigious award as a major recognition of my work and I have no doubt that it will be very helpful in my future career.”

PEDRAM ZARE DASHTI was born in Tehran, Iran in 1976. While in high school, he won gold medal in national physics Olympiad. He was a member of the team representing Iran in 25th international physics Olympiad held in Beijing, China, where he received silver medal in experimental competition and honorable mention in theoretical part. He received his bachelor’s degree in applied physics from Sharif University of Technology in 1998. After 2 years of military service, he started his graduate studies in 2001 at University of California in Irvine. He received his master’s degree in electrical engineering in 2003. He is currently a PhD candidate in UC Irvine and is expecting to receive his degree by the end of 2005. His research interests include fiber long period gratings, Acousto-Optic interaction in optical fiber, Sagnac loop mirrors, and fiber lasers.

OLUFEMI DOSUNMU was born in Bronx, NY, in 1977. He graduated from Lakewood High School in Lakewood, NJ in 1995, and received both his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering with his thesis entitled Modeling and Simulation of Intrinsic and Measured Response of High Speed Photodiodes, along with a minor in Physics from Boston University in May of 1999. In 1997, he was a summer intern at AT&T Labs in Red Bank, NJ; in 1998, he was also a summer intern at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratories in Princeton, NJ. Between 1999 and 2000, he was employed at Lucent Technologies in the area of ASIC design for high-speed telecommunication systems. While at Boston University, he was awarded the 4-year Trustee Scholarship in 1995, the National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship in 2001, as well as the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) Graduate Student Fellowship in 2004. He was also a recipient of the 2004 Boston University Science Day College of Engineering Dean’s Award for his presentation entitled “Resonant Cavity Enhanced Ge Photodetectors for 1550 nm Operation on Reflecting Si Substrates”. Mr. Dosunmu’s career objective is to be involved in the research and design of optoelectronic devices for a wide range of applications, particularly in the areas of telecommunications and space-based technologies.

MILAN MASANOVIC graduated as a valedictorian from the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1998. In spring of 2000, he obtained his M. S. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of California Santa Barbara in June 2004. His research interests are in the area of InP photonic integrated circuits with emphasis on integrated tunable wavelength converters and their applications in novel all-optical networks.
Mr. Masanovic is the winner of numerous awards and fellowships including the 2004 IEEE-LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award and the 2003 Best Student Paper award at Indium Phosphide and Related Materials conference.

BOJAN RESAN was born in Osijek, Croatia, in 1972. He received the B.S. degree in physics at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, in 1997 and the M.S. degree in photonics and imaging from Ecole Nationale Superieure de Physique de Strasbourg, France, in 1998. During his M.S. degree he conducted research in the field of optical coherence tomography at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Optics, University of South Paris, Orsay, France.
Bojan received the Ph.D. degree in optics at the College of Optics and Photonics / Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL) & Florida Photonics Center of Excellence (FPCE), University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL in 2004. His PhD research in Ultrafast Photonics group headed by prof. Peter J. Delfyett included generation of high-power ultrashort pulses from external-cavity mode-locked semiconductor lasers, their subsequent cascaded amplification and various applications such as optical communications, bioimaging, and material processing to name a few.
One of his major contributions was developing a novel dispersion-managed breathing mode, modelocked semiconductor laser. The key advance of this work is a novel approach to drastically reshape the optical pulse shape within a round trip of the laser. The resultant operation of the laser allows one to control the physical mechanisms involved in pulse formation and shaping within the ring cavity. Intensity dependent, nonlinear effects can either be enhanced or avoided at key locations within the laser cavity to enhance the performance and output characteristics, as compared to conventional modelocked semiconductor lasers. With this approach, he has been able to generate high power optical pulses with durations of 185 fs, from an electrically pumped diode laser system. The results from his research were not only published in the leading scientific journals and presented at prestigious conferences, but has also garnered public attention owing to the work being highlighted in the popular press (e.g., Optics in 2004 issue of Optics and Photonics News, Photonics Spectra).
In 2004 Bojan joined Advanced Systems Business Unit at Coherent Inc., Santa Clara, CA. He is currently involved in the research and development of novel high-power ultrafast lasers and amplifiers and deep ultraviolet narrow-linewidth laser systems.
Mr. Resan is a member of the IEEE/LEOS, OSA and SPIE. At CREOL, Bojan has been very active in professional activities, services and CREOL events. In 2003/2004, he was elected to be the Vice-President of the IEEE/LEOS CREOL Student Chapter. Bojan has received numerous awards including SPIE 2004 Graduate Student Scholarship, IEEE/LEOS 2003 Graduate Student Travel Grant, US Corporate Travel Grant, University of Central Florida Graduate Student Travel Award to name a few.

BORJA VIDAL was born in Alicante, Spain, on April 24, 1978. He received the Ingeniero de Telecomunicacion degree (M. Sc.) from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain) in fall 2001. In January 2002 he joined the Fiber-Radio Group, Nanophotonics Technology Center, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia where he is working toward his Ph.D.
His main research interests include optical beamforming for phased-array antennas, photonic microwave filters and microwave and millimeter-wave optical fiber systems. Since 2002 he has been working at the Fiber- Radio Group in two European-funded projects (IST-2000-25390OBANET and IST-1-507781GANDALF) as well as in several national and regional funded projects. He has published over 10 papers in international journals and 15 papers in conference proceedings. He also holds 2 international patents.
Mr. Vidal was recipient of three awards for his Master Thesis dissertation about optically controlled phased-array antennas, including the 2001/2002 national award of the Spanish Telecommunication Engineer Association. In addition, he has served as a reviewer for the IEEE Photonics Technology Letters and the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. He is a student member of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optic Society (IEEE/LEOS) since 2000.

SHIJUN XIAO was born in Chengdu, China in 1979. He received the B.S. degree in electronics from Beijing University, Beijing, China, in 2001, and the M.S.E.C.E. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 2003, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University.
His current research area includes optical signal processing and pulse shaping, optical Hyperfine-WDM/Sub-Carrier Multiplexing (SCM) communications, and radio frequency (RF)/microwave photonics.
Mr. Xiao is a student member of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society and the Optical Society of America (OSA). He was the first author/presenter of six conference talks and has authored five journal papers. He received the Andrews Fellowship from Purdue University for two years and the 2004 IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society Graduate Student Fellowship.

KONSTANTINOS YIANNOPOULOS received his Diploma Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at National Technical University of Athens in September 2000, ranking third among 300 students. Ever since, he has been working towards his PhD degree at the Photonics Communications Research Laboratory (PCRL), under Professor H. Avramopoulos.
His research at the PCRL has focused on the design and implementation of optical signal generation and processing circuits. The main aspects of these circuits have been ultra-high operation speed, functional versatility, reusability and low development cost, while, in the same time, the implemented circuits possess unique properties that are demonstrated for the first time. As a result, the findings of Mr. Yiannopoulos’ work have been published in major journals and top international conferences of the field. Up to now, he has co-authored sixteen articles in major journals, including IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, Journal of Lightwave Technology and OSA Optics Letters. He has also presented his work in six articles at IEEE sponsored conferences. The aforementioned published articles have already been acknowledged in sixteen journal citations, received from leading groups in the field of optical communications.
”I am very glad to be one of the 2004 IEEE LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Program recipients. This is the second time a PhD student from PCRL achieves such a distinction, which is indicative of the quality of the work performed by the researchers at the laboratory. As for me, the LEOS Award is a major scientific recognition of my work and I expect that it will significantly help my plans for the future, which are to contribute further to the advancement of the field of Photonics and Optical Networks.”

CHANGYUAN YU received the Bachelor of Science in Applied Physics and Bachelor of Economics from Tsinghua University, China in 1997, and Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Miami in 1999. Now he is pursuing the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at Optical Communications Lab in University of Southern California.
From 1997 to 2000, he worked as a teaching and research assistant at Dept. of Electrical Engineering in University of Miami. His research there focused on diffractive and integrated photonic devices, including: design and fabrication of waveguide and diffractive optical elements in high-energy-beam-sensitive glass, development of Labview beam profiler, construction of high density nondiffracting beam array for optical interconnection, and measurement of ion-exchanged photochromic glass for holographic devices.
In 2000, he transferred to University of Southern California to continue his Ph.D. study and joined Optical Communications Lab as a research assistant, supervised by Dr. Willner. His main research interests are dispersive and nonlinear effects in high-speed reconfigurable WDM optical fiber communication systems, including: management of chromatic dispersion and polarization-mode dispersion in optical fiber transmission systems, realization and application of all-optical logic gates, all-optical wavelength conversion and optical parametric amplification. Meanwhile, he has also been a teaching assistant for both Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Dept. of Physics.
During his graduate study, Mr. Yu has authored and co-authored 42 research papers (9 recently submitted; 15 as the first author) on the peer reviewed journals and prestigious conferences, such as IEEE Photonics Technology Letters (PTL), Journal of Lightwave Technology (JLT), Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC), European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC), and Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO). He is a co-inventor of 1 issued US patent. He has also served as a reviewer for some major journals such as JLT. He received “Award of Academic Merit” from graduate school of University of Miami in 1999, and was elected to “Who’s Who among Students in American Universities and Colleges” in 1999. He won IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award in 2004.
Mr. Yu is a student member of IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optic Society (LEOS), and Optical Society of America (OSA).
His research focuses on photonic devices and optical communications, including: optical diffractive devices, integrated optical waveguide devices, nonlinear fiber devices, optical interconnects, dispersive and nonlinear effects in high speed WDM optical communication systems and networks.
“It is a great honor for me to receive IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award. My researach results are accomplished by teamwork. I want to take this chance to express my thanks to my advisor and colleagues for their help. I believe Emerson’s words: Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. I will continue to pursue my dream and dedicate myself to the research in the splendid field of photonics and optical communications.”

ALEJANDRA ZAPATA was born in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1972. She is married and has a 6-year old daughter. In 1993 and 2001 she received the B Eng and M Sc degrees in Electronic Engineering from Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria (UTFSM, Valparaiso, Chile), respectively. Her M Sc thesis dealt with the performance evaluation of scheduling algorithms in ATM networks using Markov Chains with rewards.
She joined the Department of Electronic in Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria as a Junior Lecturer in 1997.During 1997-2000 she lectured on the topics of digital circuits design, computer architecture and computer networks and supervised final year student projects. She presented the project “Updating of Digital Systems Laboratory” to the Chilean Ministry of Education – receiving a major award equivalent to US$20,000. During this time she was also a co-researcher in the projects “Multicast Routing Algorithms” (1998-1999) and “Multicast Communication: QoS Routing and Reliability” (2000-2001), both supported by the National Research Council for Science and Technology (CONICYT) of Chile.
In 2001 the Chilean government awarded her the “Presidente de la República” scholarship for postgraduate studies abroad and in September 2001 she started research towards the PhD degree in the Optical Networks Group at University College London (UCL) under the supervision of Prof. Polina Bayvel. There, her work focuses on the dynamic allocation of resources in all-optical networks, in particular on the impact that dynamic routing has on the performance and scalability of wavelength-routed optical burst switched (WR-OBS) network architectures.
After finishing her Ph.D. studies she intends to boost the research activity in the optical field in Chile (where she will go back to work as academic staff), where this area has not been strongly developed yet.
Ms. Zapata is a Junior Member of the British Federation of Women Graduates, UK. She received the Award to the Best Student, promotion 1996 granted by the UTFSM Alumni Association, the Award to the Best Female Graduate of UTFSM granted in 1996 by Zonta International, the M.H. Joseph Prize granted for academic excellence in the field of Engineering by the British Federation of Women Graduates, UK, in 2003 and the LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship awarded by LEOS in 2004.