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Professor Erich P. Ippen named
recipient of the 2001-2002
James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award
Cambridge, MA 05.16.2001
 It
was announced on Wednesday, 16 May 2001 at the monthly meeting
of the MIT faculty that Professor Erich
P. Ippen of RLE has been named the 2001-2002 recipient of
the James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. The
Killian Award is the highest honor bestowed by the MIT faculty
on one of its own members. It was established in 1971 as a tribute
to the late Dr. Killian, MIT's 10th president and former chairman
of the Corporation, and "...to recognize extraordinary
professional accomplishments by full-time members of the MIT
faculty." Its recipient traditionally delivers a lecture
in the spring term of the award year.The Killian award
citation praised Professor Ippen for having, "...established
the field of femtosecond optics with Dr. Charles Shank, now
at UC Berkeley, while both were working at Bell Laboratories.
"They pioneered the generation of ultrafast laser pulses and
their use in ultrafast spectroscopy. Since this initial technological
breakthrough of the production of subpicosecond optical pulses,
Professor Ippen and
his MIT research group have pushed the pulses to be of sufficiently
short duration to capture the motion of particles in the atomic
and subatomic regime.
"Many of the phenomena discovered by Professor Ippen constitute
the fundamental bases of today's technologies. His pioneering
success in mode-locking a semiconductor laser is of particular
importance to optical communications and to making ultrafast
techniques universally accessible to the scientific community."
Professor Ippen joins the ranks of two other RLE faculty who
have been recipients of the prestigious Killian Award: RLE's
Associate Director, Professor
Daniel Kleppner, who was the
recipient for 1995-1996, and Institute Professor
Hermann A. Haus, who was the recipient in 1982-1983. |
