This press release is copyrighted by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE). Its use is granted only to journalists and news media.
On 23 June, Herwig Kogelnik will accept the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE's) highest award, the Medal of Honor. During his 40-year career as an experimenter, theorist, and administrator, Kogelnik, who will be 69 in June, has made important contributions to the basics of how lasers operate, to the underpinnings of the multichannel optical networks that make the Internet possible, and to holographic data storage. He was a co-inventor of distributed feedback lasers, ubiquitous in today's optical communications. And he was working on optical amplifiers, key to long-distance optical communications, as long ago as the 1960s.
Colleagues describe Kogelnik as a gentleman in the European mould, writes contributing editor Neil Savage in a profile of Kogelnik appearing in the June 2001 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Raised in Bleiburg, a small town in Austria, Kogelnik first studied electrical engineering at the Vienna University of Technology. He went on to the University of Oxford in England before coming to Lucent Technologies' (then AT&T's) Bell Labs in the early 1960s. He is currently adjunct photonics systems research vice president there.
As an experimenter at Bell Labs, Kogelnik designed an easy-to-work-with laser that helped illuminate the fundamentals of how lasers work. He is also credited with formulas used by engineers to predict laser behavior and create better holograms. As a research leader, he understood early on what technology was needed to make optical communications practical and fought for its funding.
The Medal of Honor will be bestowed on Kogelnik "for fundamental contributions to the science and technology of lasers and optoelectronics, and for leadership in research and development of photonics and lightwave communication systems" at the annual IEEE Honors Ceremony. It is scheduled for 23 June 2001 at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J.
Contact: Samuel K. Moore, 212 419 7921, [email protected].For faxed copies of the complete article ("Herwig Kogelnik" by Contributing Editor Neil Savage, IEEE Spectrum, June 2001, pp. 42-47) or to arrange an interview, contact: Nancy T. Hantman, 212 419 7561, [email protected].
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