Munday Named 2015 OSA Lomb Medal Recipeint

Professor Jeremy Munday (ECE/IREAP/Physics) was recently awarded the 2015 Adolph Lomb Medal by the Optical Society of America (OSA) for his pioneering contributions to plasmonic and photonic light-trapping in solar cells. The Lomb medal, established in 1940, is given annual to someone who has made noteworthy contributions to the field of optics prior to the 35th birthday.

“Receiving the Lomb Medal is a real honor,” says Munday. “I have great respect for the work of the previous winners and am very excited to be among those selected for this award.”

Munday is the director of the Laboratory for Solar and Quantum Technologies in the A. James Clark School of Engineering. His group focuses on engineering the fundamental interaction between light and matter and applying this understanding to optical systems, control of quantum forces, and for energy harvesting and photovoltaic applications. Munday and his team study novel photonic and plasmonic structures for light trapping, energy collection and extraction, communications, and sensors and merges physics and engineering to accomplish these goals.

Dr. Munday received his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard in 2008, and his B.S. in Physics and Astronomy from Middle Tennessee State University in 2003. He was a post-doctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) before joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering as an assistant professor. He also has affiliate appointments in the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics and Physics at the University of Maryland. In 2012 Munday received the NASA Early Career Faculty Award. He was the recipient of the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award in 2014, and the IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award earlier this year.

Adolph Lomb was OSA's founding treasurer from 1916 until his death in 1932. This award, established in recognition of Lomb’s devotion to OSA and the advancement of optics, is endowed through the OSA Foundation by contributions from the Global Engineering Organization of Bausch + Lomb and the journal Progress in Quantum Electronics, published by Elsevier.

Published March 12, 2015