Photonics Media Announces 2018 Teddi C. Laurin Scholarship Winner

Photonics Media has named Zhenxu Bai the 2018 recipient of the Teddi C. Laurin Scholarship.

Bai is a cotutelle Ph.D. candidate at Macquarie University in Australia and Harbin Institute of Technology in China, under the joint supervision of Professor Rich Mildren and Professor Zhiwei Lu. His research interests include solid-state lasers, ultrashort pulse laser technology, and nonlinear optics. Currently, Bai's work focuses on Raman and Brillouin lasers in diamond.

“The distinctive properties of diamond make it a promising approach in developing compact high efficiency and high brightness lasers,” he said. “My future work will focus on power-scaling of diamond lasers and development of on-chip diamond devices for microwave-photonic applications.”

Co-funded by Photonics Media and SPIE (the international society for optics and photonics), the $5000 annual scholarship is named for the late Teddi C. Laurin, an industry pioneer and founder of Laurin Publishing Co. It was created to raise awareness of optics and photonics, and to foster growth and success in the photonics industry by supporting students involved in the field. To be considered, applicants must be in their second year of an optics or photonics program, with preference given to those working on industry-leading photonics research projects.

The scholarship’s first recipient (2016), Kaitlyn Williams, is currently an optical engineer for Apple Inc. Brandon Born, the 2017 recipient, is now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.

Photonics Media is a division of Laurin Publishing Co., which publishes business-to-business magazines, industry directories, and online news, as well as webinars and other multimedia. The company is headquartered in Pittsfield, Mass., with satellite branches and editorial contributors around the world.