Ph.D. student wins two prestigious awards

	Yang Wang receives the Chinese Government Award in New York from the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China.

Yang Wang, a Ph.D. student in Lehigh’s Center for Optical Technologies, recently received one prestigious award from the Chinese government and another from SPIE—The International Society for Optical Engineering.

Wang, who enrolled at Lehigh in 2003 as a graduate student in electrical engineering, received the 2006 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad and the 2007 SPIE Educational Scholarship.

The Chinese Government Award recognizes achievements by full-time Chinese graduate students engaged in all fields of study in 30 counties around the world. It was given to 75 Chinese students in the United States this year. The award, which includes a $5,000 check and a certificate, was presented on May 5 in New York by the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China.

Other U.S. winners of the Chinese award this year came from institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon.

The $3,000 SPIE Educational Scholarship recognizes and encourages SPIE student members who show outstanding potential to make long-range contributions to the fields of optics and photonics.

SPIE cited Wang for his work in developing photonic-integrated circuits using quantum-well and quantum-dot intermixing techniques. The organization credited Wang with developing the first theoretical model to simulate multiple-species intermixing in InGaAsSb/AIGaAsSb quantum-well and InAs/InGaAl/As quantum-well dot structures. Wang has also developed a novel photonic-integration technology for InP-based quantum-dot lasers.

SPIE is the world’s largest nonprofit society for optics, photonics and imaging, with 17,500 individual members, including 3,500 students.

Wang is a member of the research group of Boon S. Ooi, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. His studies at Lehigh have been supported by Ooi’s research funding and by the Center for Optical Technologies. Wang has published about 25 journal and international conference papers on his original work at Lehigh.

Last year, Wang was one of 13 student researchers to receive SPIE’s Spectra-Physics Research Excellence Award at Photonics West 2006, a major optics conference attended by more than 10,000 delegates.

Wang holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, China, and an M.S. in electrical engineering from the National University of Singapore.

Wang and Clara Dimas, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering who also studies with Ooi, co-founded the SPIE student chapter at Lehigh. Wang, the chapter’s president, has also served as president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) at Lehigh.

--Kurt Pfitzer