WASHINGTON, Sept. 14, 2007 -- Ming C. Wu will be awarded the 2007 OSA Engineering Excellence Award, to be presented at the Optical Society of America’s (OSA) annual meeting next week, for his contributions in the fields of optical microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and ultrafast semiconductor lasers.

The meeting will be held with the Frontiers in Optics (FiO) 2007 and Laser Science XXIII conferences Sept. 16 to 20 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif. The award will be presented on Sept. 17.

Wu is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and co-director of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC). He received a PhD from UC Berkeley in 1988. He was formerly a member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill and a professor of electrical engineering at UCLA; he also co-founded San Diego-based 0MM Inc. to commercial MEMS optical switches.

His research interests are in optical MEMS, MOEMS (micro-optoelectromechanical systems), high-speed optoelectronics and optofluidics. His group pioneered the development of free-space optical MEMS, in which optical elements (mirrors, gratings, lens) are monolithically integrated with optomechanical mounts (XYZ stages) and MEMS actuators. Sixteen-by-16 optical crossbar switches have been commercialized using this technology.

Wu recently joined the scientific advisory board of photonic microelectronics supplier Electro Scientific Industries Inc. (ESI) of Portland, Ore. (See also: Optical MEMS Researcher Ming Wu Joins ESI Advisory Board)

He has published 140 journal papers, 300 conference papers and six book chapters, and was granted 16 US patents. He received a Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering in 1992. An IEEE fellow, Wu was the founding co-chair of the IEEE/LEOS Summer Topical Meeting on Optical MEMS (1996), the predecessor of the IEEE/LEOS International Conference on Optical MEMS.

Wu also co-invented monolithic colliding pulse mode-locked semiconductor lasers, which produced some of the shortest optical pulses and highest repetition frequencies in monolithic diode lasers. He is currently interested in the high-frequency response of optical injection-locked lasers and optoelectronic trapping of micro- and nano-objects.

For more information, visit: www.osa.org/meetings/annual/