By Patricia Daukantas

A Cornell University (U.S.A.) scientist specializing in on-chip nanophotonics devices has won a $500,000 “genius grant” fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

OSA Fellow Michal Lipson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell, is one of 23 award recipients in diverse fields ranging from astrophysics to sculpture, theater and jazz. MacArthur Fellows receive $500,000 over five years with no strings attached.

The 40-year-old Lipson received the award for “working at the intersection of fundamental photonics and nanofabrication engineering to design silicon-based photonic circuits that are paving the way for practical optical computing devices,” according to the foundation’s website. She was named an OSA Fellow in 2008 for “outstanding contributions to the field of silicon nanophotonics, including the development of high-bandwidth modulators and low-power nonlinear optical devices.”

The MacArthur Foundation has put a brief biography and video of Lipson online. I wrote about her work in the November 2006 Scatterings column (four-wave mixing within a broadband light amplifier) and also in January 2008 (a microfluidic device that used light to sort tiny particles).

2010-09 September, Applied optics, Biomedical optics, OFC/NFOEC nanotechnology, awards, OSA Fellows, women, photonics, silicon photonics