Federico Capasso to receive Gold Medal, highest honor of SPIE

Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been selected to receive the 2013 SPIE Gold Medal.

The Gold Medal, awarded to a single recipient annually, is the highest honor bestowed by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

The SPIE Gold Medal has been awarded since 1977 to recognize outstanding engineering or scientific accomplishments in optics, electro-optics, or photographic technologies or applications. Recipients are recognized for their research having made “an exceptional contribution to the advancement of relevant technology.”

In a letter announcing the award, SPIE President Bill Arnold noted Capasso’s “seminal and wide-ranging contributions to photonics, in particular band-gap engineering of optoelectronic materials and devices, quantum cascade lasers and plasmonics-based photonic devices.”