Researchers shortlisted for £350,000 engineering research prize

Included in the 2019 shortlist are:

• Andrea Alù, Founding Director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Professor of Electrical Engineering at The City College of New York for seminal work on optical metamaterials for scattering control, nonreciprocity, and nonlinearity, and their application in optoelectronics and photonics.

• Prof. Dr. Clara J. Saraceno, Photonics and Ultrafast Laser Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany for advances in the field of high power and high repetition rate ultrafast thin-disk oscillators with performance, which have the potential of replacing complex and expensive femtosecond laser amplifiers in the future.

• Jelena Vuckovic, Professor of Electrical Engineering and by courtesy of Applied Physics at Stanford, where she leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab, and Director of Q-FARM, Stanford-SLAC Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative for advances in ultralow threshold photonic crystal lasers and attojoule optoelectronics, on-chip quantum photonics, and development of photonics inverse design method.

• Michal Lipson, Eugene Higgins Professor at Columbia University for pioneering critical building blocks in the field of Silicon Photonics, which today is recognised as one of the most promising directions for solving the major bottlenecks in microelectronics. She is the inventor of over 30 issued patents and has co-authored more than 200 scientific publications. Since 2014, every year she has been named by Thomson Reuters as a top 1% highly cited researcher in the field of Physics.

• Xiaogang Liu, National University of Singapore, Associate Editor for Nanoscale and serves on the editorial boards of Chemistry - An Asian Journal, Advanced Optical Materials, Journal of Luminescence, and Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters for the development and demonstration of novel luminescent nanocrystals for applications in molecular sensing, volumetric 3D display, optogenetics and X-ray imaging.

Sir John O’Reilly, Chair of the IET’s Search and Selection Panel for the Prize, said: “The A F Harvey Engineering Research Prize recognises the outstanding research achievements of the recipient, from anywhere in the World, who is identified through a search and selection process conducted by a panel of international experts from around the globe. 

“We are incredibly proud, through the late Dr A F Harvey, to be able to recognise and support the furtherance of pioneering engineering research in these fields and thereby their subsequent impact in advancing the world around us.”

The IET’s A F Harvey prize is named after Dr A F Harvey who bequeathed a generous sum of money to the IET for a trust fund to be set up in his name to further research in the specified fields.

The prize winner will be chosen from a shortlist of five candidates and announced in December 2019. The winning researcher will deliver a keynote lecture on their research at IET London: Savoy Place in spring 2020.