Richart E. Slusher, director of Quantum Information Research at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., is the recipient of the 2006 Max Born Award, presented by the Optical Society of America (OSA), it was announced today. The award is named for German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Max Born and is presented annually to a person who has made outstanding contributions to theoretical or experimental physical optics. Slusher, PhD, has worked for Bell Labs, the research and development arm of communications networking solutions provider Lucent Technologies, for 40 years. Slusher's accomplishments are in areas such as as light scattering from semiconductors and liquid helium, laser diagnostics of tokomak plasmas for fusion studies, squeezed state generation and the application of squeezed states to sensitive measurement, whispering-gallery mode microdisk lasers and optical pulse propagation in nonlinear media. He was involved in the first experiment to observe nonlinear propagation effects in fiber Bragg gratings resulting in nonlinear pulse compression and soliton propagation, important phenomena for ultralong haul optical networks. Most recently, Slusher's work has focused on the emerging field of quantum information -- the application of the quantum effects of physics to information science -- with applications ranging from the creation of quantum computers to quantum-based cryptographic and communications security approaches. Slusher is a fellow in both the American Physical Society and OSA and has received numerous awards, including the Einstein Medal for Laser Science in 1989 and the Arthur Schawlow Award of the American Physical Society in 1995. He holds 12 patents and has published more than 185 papers.