People In The News

The Optical Society (OSA) has elected Dr. Alan E. Willner of the University of Southern California as its 2014 vice president. Willner will serve as president-elect in 2015, and then will serve a year as president during OSA’s 100-year anniversary in 2016.

Willner earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1988, and then was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Labs and a member of technical staff at Bellcore. He joined the engineering faculty at the University of Southern California in 1992.

He has served on OSA’s board in the past and been co-chairman of its Science & Engineering Council. He has received many awards from OSA, IEEE, the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the White House, the Guggenheim Foundation and more. He also was co-chairman of the US National Academies Study on Optics & Photonics. He has more than 1000 publications, including 24 US patents, on his research in optical communications, signal processing and networks.

OSA also elected three directors at large: Dr. Anne Tropper of the University of Southampton in England, Dr. Adam Wax of Duke University in North Carolina, and Dr. Xi-Cheng Zhang of the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester in New York.

All four will begin their terms Jan. 1 and will hold the positions for three years.