Frederik Van Laere, a PhD student in the Photonics Research Group at Ghent University-IMEC, Belgium, received the top Corning Outstanding Student Paper Award of $1500 for “Multifunctional Photonic Crystal Compact Demux-Detector on InP,” presented at the post-deadline paper session at 2008 OFC/NFOEC, sponsored by the Optical Society of America (OSA), last month in San Diego. Van Laere's research demonstrates a very compact multifunctional photonic crystal device on an InP (indium phosphide) membrane. The award is endowed by a grant from Corning and administered by the OSA Foundation. Honorable mentions of $1000 went to Mohammad Alfiad, a PhD student in the electrical engineering department at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, for his paper, "A 10.7-Gb/s DPSK Receiver with 4000-ps/nm Dispersion Tolerance using a Shortened MZDI and 4-state MLSE," and Matthew Dummer, a research assistant at the University of California, Santa Barbara, "Periodic Loading and Selective Undercut Etching for High-Impedance Traveling-Wave Electroabsorption Modulators." Papers were chosen from 410 entries from international colleges and universities. Submissions for the 2009 Corning Outstanding Student Paper Award will be accepted during the 2009 OFC/NFOEC call for papers. For more information, visit: osa.org