Three Students Receive Newport Award in Photonics
Three students have been selected to receive the 2007 Newport Awards in Photonics. The undergraduate award will be awarded jointly to seniors Joseph Ulerich and Jayson Paulose. The graduate award will be awarded to Scott Howard.
Joseph Ulerich is a senior in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department and also will be receiving a certificate in Materials Science and Engineering. He has done his senior thesis in the lab of Prof. Craig Arnold, using lasers to greatly improve the process of osseointegration, which is the stable fixation of the bioimplant surface to bone tissue. The work, entitled “Multi-scale laser surface modification of Ti-6Al-4V (a titanium-aluminium alloy) and its Effect on Cell Adhesion,” sets the 
foundation for a new generation of bioimplants, especially those for joint replacement. Prof Arnold writes, “his approach was to control the roughness on multiple length scales with multiple laser processing steps …It was not clear that it could be done, and the method he developed was not suggested to him but rather was his own idea.…It is one of the most complete works on the subject o laser surface processing in the context of cell-surface interactions that I’ve seen: a combination of high resolution experimental results along with analytical modeling, to make a significant contribution to surface processing.” Joseph also serves as president of the Princeton student chapter of the Materials Research Society, and was the league scoring leader and MVP, and team captain, for Princeton club ice hockey. Next year Joseph will be in graduate school in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, specializing in biomaterials.
Jayson Paulose is a senior in the department of Physics, but pursued all his independent work with advisors in Electrical Engineering: Prof.’s Claire Gmachl, Jason Fleisher, and Ravin Bhatt. Two of his projects focused on optics, with a third on condensed matter physics. His work spanned several new physical phenomena at the frontier of optics research, with applications from chemical sensing to medical diagnostics to high speed communication. His work on “The Effects of Resonant States on Quantum Cascade Lasers” made a fundamental advance in understanding of resonant absorbing states, which critically affect the efficiency of a new class of lasers. Prof. Gmachl writes “he is intensely motivated to solve problems and he knows to continuously “dig deeper” to refine his work. He is also an excellent communicator – it is very rewarding to discuss science with him.” In the field of nonlinear interactions of vector solitons, Prof. Jason Fleischer writes that “for cascaded soliton collisions in optical fiber, no previous theory exists. So Jason developed a numerical mode to model all of this, with creative boundary conditions, to allow him to study the dynamics and feedback and possibility for bi-stability in a fiber system.” Besides his academic excellence, Jason has been a four-year member of the university band and also volunteered with both the Princeton Community House as a high school tutor and the Easter Service Workers Association. Next year Jason will pursue a Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard.
Scott Howard is a doctoral student in Electrical Engineering under the supervision of Prof. Claire Gmachl. Scott’s thesis revolves around improving the performance of quantum cascade (QC) lasers – specifically increasing their power, raising the efficiency, and widening their spectral coverage. These lasers enable bright tunable sources in the previously largely inaccessible mid-infrared part of the spectrum. Prof. Gmachl writes that Scott has developed a unique and complex modeling tool for QC lasers that enables combining band structure, waveguide, and thermal map calculations. With this he has been able for the first time to predict the power roll-over of QC lasers. His model has been used to design and fabricate very high performance lasers in several wavelength ranges. In addition to his theoretical work, in the lab he has fabricated his own lasers, several of which are being used in an astrophysics collaboration at the University of Illinois.” Colleagues at other universities have already taken note of Scott and have invited him to talk at an international workshop. Scott also has a highly entrepreneurial spirit – with two of his graduate student colleagues he has founded PRIMIS, a spin-off company based in part on the capabilities of his QC laser model.
The selection committee consisted of Prof’s. Richard Miles, Steve Lyon, and Jim Sturm.