UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Doug Werner, John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at Penn State, has been named a Fellow of The Optical Society (OSA).
Recognition as an OSA Fellow means a researcher has served the advancement of optics with distinction. The School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor’s contributions to the field of optics has been recognized for “ground-breaking contributions to the field of optical metamaterials including metamaterial-enabled optical devices exhibiting reconfigurable/tunable, multiband, and broadband properties, and to the field of global optimization techniques in computational electromagnetics/optics.”
Werner, the director of the Computational Electromagnetics and Antennas Research Lab (CEARL) at Penn State, has been at the forefront of the design and application of metamaterials — synthetic, composite materials that are engineered to possess unique qualities not available in natural materials — which can be used in radio frequencies through the optical regime. This research, for example, has allowed his team to engineer a device that exhibits chameleon-like behavior in the infrared, and to demonstrate the first practical application for electromagnetic cloaking technology that eliminates strong interference and coupling between multiple antennas when they are placed in close proximity.
“This is an important recognition of Doug’s research accomplishments and a distinction for our department,” said Kultegin Aydin, electrical engineering department head and professor.
Werner also is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society, and the Institution of Engineering Technology.