The Optical Society of America (OSA) has announced that OSA Fellow and professor Christopher Dainty of the National University of Ireland, Galway, (NUI Galway) has been elected as its 2009 vice president. Dainty holds the chair of applied physics in the School of Physics at the NUI Galway, has been active in the global optics community for several decades and was recently elected to membership in the Royal Irish Academy. His research interests include optical imaging, scattering and propagation; he has co-authored or edited six books, approximately 140 peer-reviewed papers and 220 conference presentations. Dainty has been an OSA member since 1971 and is a two-time past member of its board. He has served on the Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging Program Committee, Adaptive Optics: Analysis and Methods Program Committee, and the Signal Recovery and Synthesis Program Committee. Dainty also served as the secretary-general and president of the International Commission for Optics, as well as president of the European Optical Society. He currently is a member of the board of the Photonics 21 European Technology Platform and is also on the external/scientific advisory boards of The Center for Adaptive Optics (Santa Cruz, Calif.) and The Institute of Photonic Sciences (Barcelona, Spain). As OSA vice president, Dainty will automatically become president-elect in 2010 and then the society's president in 2011, followed by a one-year term as past president.