ICFO Alumnus wins OSA’s Ivan P. Kaminow Outstanding Early Career Professional Prize

ICFO alumnus Chaitanya Kumar Suddapalli has recently been named the 2020 recipient of the Ivan P. Kaminow Outstanding Early Career Professional Prize for his contributions to the field of optics and photonics. This is the second time that an ICFO alumnus has achieved this honor. Giovanni Volpe, ICFO PhD graduate of 2008, was also awarded this prize in 2012, its first edition.

Each year, one early career professional member of OSA receives this prize which provides funding to attend The OSA Leadership Meeting and to an OSA-managed meeting of their choice. Recipients also have the opportunity to be placed and mentored on OSA Committees, further enhancing their professional development.

Chaitanya received his B.Sc. degree in mathematics, physics, and electronics from Acharya Nagarjuna University, Guntur, India, in 2003, and M.Sc. degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, India, in 2006. Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Majid Ebrahim-Zadeh, he graduated from ICFO’s PhD program in 2012 after defending his thesis on high-power, fiber-laser-pumped optical parametric oscillators from the visible to mid-infrared, for which he was awarded ICFO’s PhD Thesis award for applied research as well as the Extraordinary PhD Thesis Award from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Chaitanya continues his relationship with ICFO, currently working as both a visiting scientists at ICFO in the Optical Parametric Oscillators group and as a Laser Scientist in the research and development division at Radiantis, an ICFO spin-off that is a world leading specialist company in developing nonlinear frequency conversion sources.

Congratulations Chaitanya!