SPIE 2020 New Fellows Cohort Includes Marcelo Dapino, Alper Erturk, and Zoubeida Ounaies

In 2020, SPIE welcomes 72 Members as new Fellows of the Society. Fellows are Members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. They are honored for their technical achievement and for their service to the general optics community and to SPIE in particular. More than 1,500 SPIE Members have become Fellows since the Society's inception in 1955.

New Fellows receive their plaques from the current SPIE President as well as in-person recognition from their peers at the SPIE conference of their choice during the year that they are inducted. This year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, SPIE has transitioned several in-person conferences to digital forums. Therefore, we will be celebrating the Fellows virtually as well, via articles such as this one and through our various online platforms. These recognitions will be timed to the new Fellows' preferred SPIE conferences, during their digital-forum timeframe. Additionally, each Fellow will be invited to enjoy the traditional in-person recognition at the 2021 event of their choice.

This year, three new Fellows, Marcelo Dapino, Alper Erturk, and Zoubeida Ounaies, elected to be recognized at 2020 SPIE Smart Structures + Non-Destructive Evaluation.

Marcelo Dapino, a professor of mechanical engineering, the Honda R&D Americas Designated Chair in Engineering, and director of the NSF-IUCRC Smart Vehicle Concepts Center at Ohio State University, is recognized for outstanding contributions to smart materials and structures, especially magnetostrictive alloys and applications. Dapino has been an active member of the SPIE community since 1995, including his roles as author, program organizer, and session organizer and chair for the SPIE Smart Structures and Materials + Nondestructive Evaluation symposium. One of the earliest awards of his distinguished career was an SPIE Best Student Paper Award in 1999.

Alper Erturk, Woodruff Professor in the G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he leads the Smart Structures and Dynamical Systems Laboratory, is recognized for outstanding contributions to nonlinear energy harvesting, bio-inspired piezoelectric actuation, and metamaterials. His publications have appeared across a broad range of prestigious journals in applied physics, mechanics, dynamics, electromechanical systems, and smart material. Erturk has been an SPIE course instructor on "Methods of Energy Harvesting for Low-Power Sensors," and has served for several years as the conference chair or co-chair for the Active and Passive Smart Structures and Integrated Systems conference at the SPIE Smart Structures + Nondestructive Evaluation Symposium.

Zoubeida Ounaies, a professor of mechanical engineering and holder of the Dorothy Quiggle Career Developmental Professorship at The Pennsylvania State University, is being recognized for pioneering contributions to analysis and realization of mechanical-electrical-chemical coupling in polymer nanocomposites. Though her research, Ounaies develops new flexible, lightweight smart materials with rare combinations of mechanical, electrical, and coupled properties for applications as varied as advanced electronics, autonomous robotics, aerospace, automotive, medical, and consumer industries. At Penn State, Ounaies established the Electroactive Materials Characterization Laboratory (EMCLab), an experimental research facility dedicated to advancing the application of smart materials in sensing, actuation, and energy harvesting. Since 2017, she has been symposium co-chair of SPIE Smart Structures and Materials + Nondestructive Evaluation; this year, she takes on the role of symposium chair.

As noted earlier this year by Jeffrey Puschell, Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems engineer and chair of the SPIE Fellows Committee, SPIE Fellows represent the vibrant technical range, diversity, and ethos of the Society, and the SPIE Fellows program proudly honors the innovations that these research, industry, and government scientists create, develop, and implement across the optics and photonics landscape. SPIE invites every constituent in our community to consider your distinguished colleagues, their professionalism, and their work. Please send us your nominations for next year's SPIE Fellows by 15 September.

The complete list of the 2020 SPIE Fellows is available online, along with a list of all SPIE Fellows, nomination criteria, and the SPIE Fellows nomination form.