The LEOS Graduate Student Fellowships 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).
New guidelines have been established for the 2006 application process. Please check the LEOS website for more details. (www.i-leos.org)
LEOS is proud to present profiles of our 2005 LEOS Graduate Student Fellows:

HATICE ALTUG received her Bachelor of Science Degree in Physics in 2000 with high honor from Bilkent University, Turkey. She received Fellowship awards from Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey and from Bilkent University during her undergraduate education. During her undergraduate years, she was involved in several experimental and theoretical projects such as fabrication and experimental demonstration of layer-by-layer metallic photonic crystals (Bilkent 1998), microscopic theory of vortex states in superconductivity (Bilkent, 1999), analytical and experimental study of normal-zone propagation velocity in superconducting NbTi wires (University of Twente, Netherlands, summer 1999), and measurement of electron conduction quantization in metal nano-contacts (Bilkent, 2000).
In 2000, she started Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University, and expected to finish in 2006. She is working with Prof. Jelena Vuckovic, and Altug’s current research is focused on the design and implementation of nanoscale photonic devices to confine and manipulate photons. It involves demonstration of high performance and ultra-compact nano-photonic devices including lasers and all-photonic switches in silicon and Indium-Phosphide, and their large-scale integration on chip. She is also working on construction of sensitive on-chip biosensors integrated with microfluidics. In 2004, she has designed a new device composed of coupled arrays of photonic crystal nano-cavities, which reduces the speed of light and enhances laser light amplification dramatically. Her paper describing this structure was featured on the cover of Applied Physics Letters. She later experimentally measured the reduction of group velocity of light, which was also featured in Physics World Magazine. She most recently demonstrated low threshold photonic crystal laser in Indium-Phosphide with large power conversion efficiency and high output powers, and received the Newport/LEOS Research Excellence Award. Her laser work is highlighted in several magazines including Photonics Spectra and Laser Focus World. She is also working on strong nonlinearities in photonic crystal nanocavities to realize a nano-scale all-optical switch that can operate at 100Gbit/sec with only a few femto-Joules pulse energies and their integration. With this work, she became the co-recipient of the first place award in the Inventors’ Challenge competition of Silicon Valley in 2004, Berkeley. During the first few years of her Ph.D program, Altug also worked on multiple quantum well electro-absorption modulators for optical interconnects with Prof. David Miller. The work that she co-authored was featured as Hot Topics in the June 2005 issue of IEEE/LEOS Newsletters.
She is an author and coauthor of 15 journal and conference papers. Hatice is an Intel and IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellow. She is also the president of Stanford Student Chapter of Optical Society of America.

RAY CHEN (S’01) received the B.Sc. degree in Electronics Engineering from National Chiao Tung University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan, R.O.C. in 1997 and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA in 2001. From 1997 to 1999, he served in the Chinese Army as a Communication Technical Officer. During the summer of 2000, he interned at IBM Microelectronics, Essex Junction, VT, where he was working on IC testing methodology for ASICs. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering under Prof. David A. B. Miller at Stanford University. His research interests are semiconductor optoelectronics, silicon photonics, broad area photonics components and systems/networks, optical interconnects, and high speed CMOS analog interface circuit design for optical devices/components. His doctoral research focuses on CMOS controlled rapidly tunable photodetectors for access network and telecommunication applications.
Mr. Chen is one of the recipients of IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) Graduate Student Fellowship Award in 2005.
“It is my great honor to receive this IEEE LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award. I would like to use this chance to thank my Ph. D thesis advisor, Prof. David A. B. Miller, for his patient guidance and all of my colleagues at Miller’s group for their company and help.”

MABLE MEI-PO FOK received her Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Philosophy degrees in Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2002 and 2004, respectively. During her undergraduate study, she joined ASM Assembly Automation Ltd. as an Engineer Trainee for 1 year. She won the championship of the CUHK Graduation Project Contest in 2002 for her work on photonic analog-to-digital conversion. Her research findings was later published in Photonics Technology Letters, marking the first of the 30 plus papers that she has now published. Before she began her master study in 2002, she was a summer intern at the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute and worked on photonic packaging of high-speed transceiver modules for data communications.
Currently, Mable is working towards her Ph.D. in the Department of Electronic Engineering and the Center for Advanced Research in Photonics at CUHK. Her research focus is on the novel design and applications of birefringent comb filters for multi-wavelength laser sources. She has demonstrated the generation of bandwidth-enhanced tunable multi-wavelength sources together with repetition-rate multiplication of the pulsed output by the spectral elimination approach. Mable also looks into new types of all-optical signal processing techniques using nonlinear effects in specialty fibers. In the last summer, she carried out research on supercontinuum generation at the Optoelectronics Circuits and Systems Laboratory of UCLA.
Mable participates actively in international conferences. She is a regular reviewer for research journals including Photonics Technology Letters and Optics Letters. Recently, she has received an Outstanding Paper Award from the 2005 STFOC conference, the best presentation award from the 2005 IEEE Hong Kong LEOS Postgraduate Conference, the Hong Kong Association of University Women Thomas HC Cheung Postgraduate Scholarship in Science and Engineering, the 2005 IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Travel Grant, and the 2005 IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship.

GIANCARLO GAVIOLI was born in Vimercate, Italy, in 1976. I received a BEng degree in Electronic Engineering from Oxford Brookes University in 1999 and an MRes degree in Telecommunications from University College London (UCL) in 2000.
I’m currently working toward my PhD with the Optical Networks Group at UCL. My PhD studies are financially supported by the EPSRC (UK) and by Agilent Technologies Ltd (UK).
My research activities are in the area of optical processing devices for multiwavelength optical networks, nonlinear effects in SOA and high-bit rate transmission systems. My most recent work has focused on the experimental investigation of 40Gbit/s transmission with cascaded all-optical 3R regeneration.
Since January 2005 I have been working on the European funded projects “NOBEL”, looking at the application of ultra-fast SOA gates in future all-optical networks.
I was very pleased to receive the LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship in 2005; this recognition has strongly encouraged and helped me to further my research in the field of optics. I am extremely grateful to my Ph.D. supervisor, Prof. Polina Bayvel, for proposing my name to the selection committee.

DANIEL M. GRASSO was born in Buffalo, NY, on August 25, 1977. He received B. S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-Buffalo) in 2000. In Fall 2000, he joined the Photonic Device Research Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received the M. S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2002. He is expected to complete the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in Spring 2006.
His research work is in the area of composite-resonator vertical-cavity lasers. Many characteristics of semiconductor lasers can be improved through the use of multi-section devices, and this work seeks to develop an improved communication source for analog fiber-optic links. Some of the demonstrated properties have included low threshold current, high slope efficiency, and high small-signal modulation bandwidth. His work has been recognized through fellowships and awards from several sources, including SUNY-Buffalo, Illinois, and Sandia National Laboratories. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and the IEEE. Dan’s career objective is to work in an industrial research and development position involved in optoelectronics, communication systems, or microwave circuits.
“I am honored to receive one of the 2005 IEEE LEOS Graduate Student Fellowships, and I personally thank the Society for bestowing this achievement on me. The LEOS meeting this year was comprised of an excellent technical program, and I felt very welcome in the city of Sydney. I would like to acknowledge my advisor, Professor Kent Choquette, for providing creativity, mentoring, and the vision behind our work. In addition, I would like to recognize the Electrical and Computer Engineering department as well as the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at Illinois for providing a superior research environment.”

SANDER LARS JANSEN was born in Maartensdijk, The Netherlands, in 1978. He received his M.S. degree in electrical engineering in 2002 from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. In summer 2000 he was an intern at NEC in Tokyo, Japan where he developed an automated tracking program for a network of observation cameras. From November 2001 to July 2002 he conducted his master thesis at Siemens in Germany under the scope of the European funded FASHION project. For this project he realized an optical four-wave mixing based de-multiplexer capable of de-multiplexing 160-Gbit/s OTDM to 40-Gbit/s.
Since November 2002 he conducts his PhD research under the supervision of Prof. G.D. Khoe at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands in collaboration with the Siemens AG in Germany. His PhD thesis focuses on ultra long-haul transmission employing optical phase conjugation. Recent results on 21.4-Gbit/s and 42.8-Gbit/s DQPSK transmission in combination with optical phase conjugation have been published at the post-deadline sessions of the Optical Fiber Conference 2005 and the European Conference on Optical Communications 2005. As first author, he published more than 20 refereed papers and conference contributions (36 including co-authored papers). He has been invited to present a talk at the Optical Fiber Conference 2006. As well he has been invited to publish in the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Techology and the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.

ZHI JIANG was born in 1977 in Sichuan Province, China. He received the B.S. (highest Honors) and M.S. degrees from the Department of Electronics Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. Since August of 2002, he has been working with Prof. Andrew M. Weiner towards Ph.D. in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN and is expecting to receive his degree in 2006.
Mr. Jiang’s research focuses on the areas of ultrafast technology, optical pulse shaping, pulse measurement, microwave photonics, optical fiber communication, fiber nonlinearities and optical code division multiple access (O-CDMA). Besides being the lead student in implementing the O-CDMA project at Purdue University supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he built the first grating-based spectral line-by-line pulse shaper. In contrast to a traditional pulse shaper, which can only control groups of spectral lines, this apparatus is able to manipulate individual spectral line of an ultrafast pulse. Its unprecedented capability of controlling ultrafast pulses has the potential for significant impact to the fields of pulse processing (e.g. optical arbitrary waveform generation) and frequency metrology (e.g. femto-second frequency comb stabilization).
He has been author or co-author of over 40 journal articles and conference papers (first author of most papers), including 3 invited and 3 post-deadline papers. He also serves as an active reviewer for IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology and Optics Express.
He received Ross and Mary I. Williams Fellowship, Purdue University in 2002-2003. He has been selected as a finalist for the 2005 OSA New Focus/Bookham Student Award. He is one of the recipients of the 2005 IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowships. He was a Gold Medalist in the 26th International Physics Olympiad Contest (IPhO), Canberra, Australia in 1995.
“Receiving the IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship is a great honor and definitely encourages me to pursue my future career in this area.”

ALESSANDRO MARQUES DE MELO (S’01) was born in Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, on July 22, 1974. He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Federal University of Ceara (UFC, Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, in automation and optics communications in February 1998 and July 2000, respectively.
From January 1995 to March 1997, he worked as an undergraduate student researcher at the Nonlinear Optics and Material Science Laboratory (LONCM) at the Physics Faculty of the Federal University of Ceara, where he worked on topics related to numerical methods for nonlinear optical communications and soliton dynamics. He worked for nearly two years at the Brazilian Telecommunications sector from January 1997 to November 1998 as a permanent member of the technical staff of TELECEARA, a company of the former Brazilian State Telecommunication System, where he was involved with technical and administrative contract’s management of radio systems equipment. In November 1998 he was awarded with a scholarship from the Fundacao Cearense de Amparo a Pesquisa (FUNCAP), a foundation that supports graduate research projects in the State of Ceara, to pursue a Master study at the Federal University of Ceara. In April 1999 he was awarded with the ALFA (America Latina Formacion Academica) scholarship from the European Union to develop his Master thesis at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Coimbra (Portugal), where he worked from April 1999 to February 2000 on soliton control and switching techniques. He finished his Master thesis in July 2000 with the title: Optical time demultiplexing with ultrashort pulses in a fiber-optic asymmetric interferometer (in Portuguese). In the same month he was awarded with a scholarship from the CAPES Foundation (related to the Ministry of Education of Brazil) to pursue a PhD program at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Coimbra (Portugal) where he worked from October 2000 to July 2001 on the performance evaluation of multi-channel soliton transmission and switching within the frame of the project TRANSPARENT (TRANSPort, Access and distRibution in optically multiplExed NeTworks.) In September 2001 he moved to the Institut fur Hochfrequenztechnik-und Halbleiter-Systemtechnologien, Technische Universitat Berlin, Berlin, Germany, where he is currently pursuing his PhD degree in the area of nonlinear applications of semiconductor optical amplifiers for all-optical signal processing in OTDM networks, under the supervision of Prof. Klaus Petermann, in a cooperative project with Fraunhofer Insitute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut.
His main achievements include: the proposal of a novel setup for XOR operation at 160 Gbit/s, a modified interferometer setup for very high-speed OTDM Add/Drop Multiplexing, the upgrade and development of a full time-domain Semiconductor Optical Amplifier model for applications in OTDM networks, the analysis and optimization of ultra-high speed optical signal processing in Nonlinear Optical Loop Mirrors and the investigation of novel methods for pattern effects reduction in Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers. His work has been published in 22 peer reviewed international journals and conferences.
Mr. Marques de Melo has also been actively involved in the preparation and submission of projects in the area of optical signal processing at national and EU levels. He is a Student Member of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS), and the Optical Society of America (OSA) and currently acts a reviewer for the IEE Electronics Letters.

JOYCE KAI SEE POON is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in the group of Prof. Amnon Yariv. She received the M. S. in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 2003 and the B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science (Physics option) from the University of Toronto in 2002.
Joyce’s current research is on the transmission and optical delay properties of Coupled-Resonator Optical Waveguides (CROWs). CROWs are chains of resonators in which light is guided by the weak coupling between neighboring resonators. Her research interests include the theory, design, and experimental studies of propagation and coupling of optical waves in resonators and periodic structures.
In addition to the LEOS Graduate Fellowship, Joyce is grateful for the awards which have supported her graduate studies, including the OSA Dekker Foundation scholarship, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) postgraduate scholarship, Julie Payette-NSERC research scholarship, and the Caltech Atwood fellowship.
Joyce is also thankful for the professors and her research group at Caltech for making her graduate experience rewarding and enjoyable. She hopes to be a productive and effective contributor to the field for many more years to come.

TAKUO TANEMURA
Information was not available at time of print.

JAROSLOW PIOTR TURKIEWICZ was born in Koszalin, Poland in 1974. He received his M.Sc. degree in telecommunications engineering from the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology of The Warsaw University of Technology, Poland in 1998. From 1997 to 1999 he was working at the Polish Telecom Research and Development Center. In 2000 he started the post-master studies at the Stan Ackermans Institute, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. The design project concerned the WDM transmission system for the LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) antenna system. In 2002 he joined the COBRA Research Institute, Eindhoven University of Technology, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree. From 2002 to 2003 he participated in the European project FASHION (ultraFAst Switching in HIgh-speed Optical time-division multiplexed Networks). Recently, he concentrated on ultra-wideband wavelength conversion and transmission in the 1310 nm wavelength domain. He authored and co-authored more than 30 journal and conference papers. He acts as a reviewer for IEEE Photonics Technology Letters and IEE Electronics Letters. His field of interest includes all-optical switching, applications of the semiconductor amplifiers, and high bit rate transmission systems.

CHAD S. WANG
Information was not available at time of print.