WASHINGTON, May 24 -- The Optical Society of America (OSA) and Bookham New Focus announced the finalists of the OSA-Bookham New Focus Student Award, which recognizes students of excellence in research, presentation and leadership, at the 2005 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics/Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference (CLEO/QELS), being held this week in Baltimore. The conference is held concurrently with Photonic Applications, Systems and Technologies (PhAST), a forum for engineers and applications specialists. This year, the student competition attracted more than 20 submissions from a variety of prominent colleges and universities in the US and abroad. The seven finalists will be evaluated on oral presentations of their research tonight at the Baltimore Convention Center. Six of the seven finalists will receive a $1500 cash prize each and one finalist will receive $5000, to be awarded tomorrow at the CLEO/QELS awards and plenary session. The finalists will present papers on the following topics: photonic crystal vertical cavity lasers and arrays -- Aaron Danner, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; photon recoil momentum in dispersive media -- Gretchen Campbell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; wide-angle transmission into photonic crystals -- Thomas P. White, CUDOS (Center for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems), University of Sydney, Australia; measuring the electric field of ultrashort pulses by interferometric spectral trace observation -- Ivan Amat-Roldan, Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, Barcelona, Spain; multichannel wavelength conversion of DPSK signals using four-wave mixing in highly nonlinear fiber without cross-gain-modulation penalty -- Preetpaul Devgan, Northwestern University; spectral line-by-line pulse shaping -- Zhi Jiang, Purdue University; 3-D wide angle laser beam steering using liquid crystals -- Sajjad A. Khan, CREOL (Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers), University of Central Florida. More 2005 CLEO/QELS coverage