The 2025 SPIE Society Awards

The Awards Committee of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has announced the recipients of its prestigious annual awards. Honoring transformative advancements across a range of professional areas — including medicine, astronomy, lithography, optical metrology, optical design, and community leadership — the Society's awards recognize technical accomplishments as well as committed service to SPIE and support of its organizational mission.

ICREA Professor at ICFO Dr. F. Javier García de Abajo, leader of the Nanophotonics Theory group, was awarded the SPIE Mozi Award, established by the Taiwan Information Storage Association (TISA) and SPIE in 2017. This international award is named in honor of the Chinese philosopher, scientist, and engineer, Mozi (468-391 BC), the first person in recorded history to mention the simple principles behind the concept of camera obscura. This award is presented for outstanding discoveries, scientific and technical achievements, or inventions in the field of optics. The award citation praises his “seminal contributions to confined optical polaritons, their interaction with free electrons, and applications in nonlinear nanophotonics, optical sensing, and ultrafast processes in condensed-matter systems.”

Commenting on Javier’s work and achievements, Albert Polman,  professor and Scientific Group Leader of Photonic Materials at the AMOLF research institute in Amsterdam declared, “...I do not know of any other theorist in my research field that is so strongly linked to so many research groups in the world and has impacted their work to such a great extent. He is a world-renowned scientist who carries out work at the highest possible level and has not only created impact in state-of-the-art research areas but has actually defined these areas himself.”

The Mozi award is one of 21 awards that was given today. Of special interest to ICFOnians is also the award of the Gold Medal, SPIE’s highest honor, that was awarded to ICFO Scientific Advisory Board member Prof. Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop for innovations in the transfer of optical angular momentum to matter.

We congratulate all the note-worthy recipients of SPIE’s prestigious awards, with an especially warm round of applause to Javier!