Brandon Born, a student at the University of British Columbia, is the recipient of the 2017 Teddi C. Laurin Scholarship. Born is a Ph.D. candidate and sessional instructor at the university, conducting research in the Integrated Optics Laboratory with professor Jonathan Holzman. His research is focused on the creation of a practical all-optical switching device for fiber front-end systems. He’s also involved in developing all-optical photonic chip architectures in a collaboration with professor Benjamin Eggleton at the University of Sydney.

The scholarship is named in honor of Teddi C. Laurin, founder of Laurin Publishing Co. Co-funded by Photonics Media and SPIE, the $5000 award 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/photonics program, with preference given to those working on industry-leading photonics research projects.

The scholarship’s first recipient, Kaitlyn Williams, finished her master’s degree in May with a thesis on the effectiveness of functionally fitting freeform optical surfaces with Cartesian- vs. polar-based orthonormal basis function. Williams will be giving a presentation at the International Optical Design Conference (IODC) in Denver this month.