Biography:Kerry Vahala
Kerry J. Vahala is the Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Professor of Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Since 2013 he has also served as the Executive Officer of the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Caltech.
Vahala studies the physics and applications of photonic devices called optical microcavities1. He has received an Alexander von Humboldt Award for his work on ultra-high-Q optical microcavities 2. Vahala was also involved in the early effort to develop quantum-well lasers for optical communications and shared with Y. Arakawa and K. Lau the 2009 IEEE David Sarnoff Award for research on quantum-well laser dynamics. Their "combined work formed the basis for nearly all of today’s high-speed semiconductor laser design for lightwave high-speed telecommunications, particularly in the metropolitan and local-area arena."3
Vahala is a Fellow of the IEEE, the IEEE Photonics Society and the Optical Society of America. He has also received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award and ONR Young Investigator Award and was the first recipient of Caltech’s Feynman Hughes Fellowship 4. He has served as associate editor to both Photonics Technology Letters and the Journal of the Optical Society and was Program Chair and General Chair for the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics in 2000 and 2001. Vahala also serves on the International Advisory Board for ICFO in Barcelona 5.
Vahala received his B.S. (1980) and Ph.D. (1985) degrees in Applied Physics and M.S. (1981) in Electrical Engineering at Caltech. Research group website: http://vahala.caltech.edu/
References
1. K. J. Vahala, "Optical microcavities" Nature 424, 839-846 (2003)
2. http://galcit.caltech.edu/news/248
3. https://www.ieee.org/about/awards/bios/sarnoff_recipients.
5. https://www.icfo.eu/general-information
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