ICO Prize 2003 winner profile: Benjamin Eggleton, tailoring new photonic devices
Benjamin J. Eggleton is currently a Federation Fellow of the Australian Research Council (ARC), Professor of Physics and the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) at the University of Sydney in Australia. He received his Ph.D in Physics from the University of Sydney in 1996. He then joined Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, as a Postdoctoral Member of Technical Staff in the Optical Physics Department where he explored nonlinear pulse propagation effects in one-dimensional photonic crystal materials. In 1998 he transferred to the Optical Fiber Research Department at Bell Laboratories and subsequently was promoted to Technical Manager of the Fiber Grating and Devices group where he lead Lucent Technologies research effort in fiber grating devices. In this role he lead a team that invented and developed a 40Gb/s tunable dispersion compensator that was subsequently manufactured and deployed in optical networks. In 2000 he was promoted to Research Director within the Speciality Fiber Devices Business Division where he was responsible for forward-looking research and research prototyping supporting Lucent Technologies business in optical fiber devices and components, including fiber lasers, Raman amplifiers, optical performance monitors and polarization management devices.
More recently he was Director of the Photonic Devices Research Department in OFS Laboratories, part of the newly formed OFS Fitel business. Dr. Eggleton has co-authored over 90 journal publications and numerous conference papers and invited presentations. Dr Eggleton was the recipient of 1998 Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America for the first demonstration of nonlinear pulse propagation effects in photonic bandgap materials. He received the distinguished lecturer award from the IEEE/LEOS in 2002, is an OSA fellow and was the co-inventor of a photonic device that was award an R&D100 award. His research interests include nonlinear optics, photonic bandgap structures, optical fiber gratings, air-silica microstructured fibers, tunable optical fiber devices, microfluidics, dispersion compensation techniques, Raman amplification and optical regeneration. He was the Program Chair for the 2003 LEOS Topical Meeting on Photonic Crystals and Holey Fibres and serves on various conference committees. He is also an associated editor for IEEE Photonics Technology Letters. It is expected that Prof. Benjamin J. Eggleton will deliver the ICO Prize 2003 Lecture in the forthcoming ICO-20 Triennial Congress “Challenging Optics in Science and Technology”, Changchung, China, 21-26 August 2005.
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