March 14, 2007, Piscataway, NJ--The IEEE has named David Payne as the recipient of its 2007 Photonics Award, recognizing his pioneering contributions to the development and commercialization of optical fiber-based technologies for communications, sensors and high-power applications.
Sponsored by the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society, the award recognizes outstanding achievements in photonics. It will be presented to Payne at the 2007 Conference on Optical Fiber Communications - OFC 2007 Collocated National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference in Anaheim, CA, on 27 March 2007.
Payne is director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton (Highfield, Southampton, UK) with an impressive record of influential contributions to the field of photonics spanning a four-decade career. Payne early recognized the potential of optical fiber communication and pioneered the development of several key related technologies. His achievements include fiber design, optical amplifiers, specialty fibers and high-power lasers and amplifiers. He made early contributions to fiber manufacturing and doping materials; was the first to use phosphorous as a core dopant that gave numerous processing advantages; invented and developed fibers with unique birefringence properties; and created the erbium-doped fiber amplifier that revolutionized optical fiber communications. He and his team have designed some of the highest power fiber lasers in the world and generated a host of fiber components in the sensor arena, involving many novel Bragg grating materials and devices that have significantly improved functionality.
Payne also launched two companies, York Technology, (from which sprung a number of companies in the Southampton area, including Fibercore and SENSA) and SPI Lasers, that have helped further the commercial advancement of the photonics field. A Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the IEEE, and the Optical Society of America, he has received numerous awards for his work, including the IEEE/OSA John Tyndall Award, Commander of the Order of the British Empire and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute.
For more information, contact the IEEE.