Maryellen Giger was recently elected to serve as the 2016 vice president of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. She will serve as president-elect in 2017 and as president in 2018. The organization also recognized industry leaders and prominent researchers during its Optics + Photonics conference last month. Receiving SPIE's highest honor, Nader Engheta of the University of Pennsylvania received SPIE's highest honor, the Gold Medal of the Society, in recognition of his contributions to optical engineering of metamaterials and nanoscale plasmonics, metamaterial-based optical nanocircuits and biologically inspired optical imaging. Leadership elections Giger, the newly elected vice president, will succeed 2016 President Robert Lieberman, who is president of Lumoptix LLC, and 2017 President Glenn Boreman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and cofounder and chairman of Plasmonics Inc. Gary Spiegel, a retired senior vice president at Newport Corp., was elected secretary and treasurer. David L. Andrews of the University of East Anglia, Jennifer Barton of University of Arizona, James Fujimoto of MIT and Joseph Howard of NASA were elected to serve three-year terms as directors. Giger is the A.N. Pritzker professor of radiology, vice-chairwoman of radiology and a member of the Committee on Medical Physics at the University of Chicago. She is an SPIE fellow and editor-in-chief of the organization's Journal of Medical Imaging. She is also the founding chairwoman of the program committee for the Computer-Aided Diagnosis Conference at the SPIE Medical Imaging symposium. She served on the SPIE board of directors from 2012 to 2014. Giger has a master's degree in physics from the University of Exeter and a doctorate in medical physics from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include computer-aided diagnosis for breast cancer image interpretation, quantitative image analysis and data mining of medical images for radiomics, and imaging genomics in risk assessment, diagnosis, prognosis and response to therapy, as well as data mining for cancer discovery. Other awards Also at Optics + Photonics, SPIE recognized the contributions of past President Eustace Dereniak and fellow Jim Oschmann. Dereniak, professor emeritus of the University of Arizona, is an internationally recognized expert in IR detectors and systems for medicine, astronomy and defense. He taught at the university's College of Optical Sciences from 1976 to 2014 and was president of SPIE in 2012. An expert in astronomical telescope design and lasers, Oschmann is vice president and general manager of the Civil Space and Technology business unit of Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., and has a master's degree from the University of Arizona, where he was named optical sciences alumnus of the year in 2014. He has served on several SPIE boards and committees. Other award recipients included: • Richard Juergens (Raytheon Missile Systems), A.E. Conrady Award • Aristide Dogariu (University of Central Florida), G.G. Stokes Award • Rajpal Sirohi (Tezpur University), Chandra S. Vikram Award in Optical Metrology • Virendra Mahajan (The Aerospace Corp.), Educator Award • Alan Lee (LongWave Photonics LLC), Early Career Achievement Award, Industry Focus.