SPIE President-Elect Jim Oschmann with SPIE 2018 Mozi Award winner Din Ping Tsai

BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA and CARDIFF, UK - SPIE Fellow Din Ping Tsai, Director and Distinguished Research Fellow of the Research Center for Applied Sciences at Academia Sinica, President of Taiwan Information Storage Association, and professor in the Department of Physics at National Taiwan University, was honored with the first Mozi Award at the SPIE Optics + Photonics Awards Banquet In recognition of his contribution to the optical meta-lens and meta-devices areas.

Tsai's research interests include applied physics, optics, photonics, nanophotonics, near-field optics, plasmonics, metamaterials, metasurface, biophotonics, green photonics, and quantum photonics. Applications of his research are focused on energy, environment, and better quality of life.

Professor Din Ping Tsai reported the first near-field experimental study of the optical waveguides in 1990, and, since then, made other salient contributions in near-field optics including reporting the first near-field Raman spectroscopy and localized surface plasmon polariton measurements in 1994, developing tapping-mode near-field microscopy in 1998, and a near-field optical disk in 1999. More recently, he developed a reflective metasurface and meta-hologram in 2014, and a full-color broadband achromatic meta-lens in 2017 which will allow innovations in full-color optical detection and optical imaging.

Professor Tsai is a former president of the Taiwan Photonics Society. He was a member of the SPIE Board of Directors from 2012 to 2014, and member of the SPIE Fellows Committee for three years (2010-2013). He also served as chair (2004-2005) and vice-chair (1996-1997) of the SPIE Taiwan chapter.

The Mozi Award was established in 2017 to honor the great contributions that Chinese philosopher and engineer Mozi (468-391 BC) made to optics, describing the optics of pinhole imaging or camera obscura. The award recognizes an outstanding discovery, invention, or scientific or technical achievement in the field of optics. It is endowed by the Taiwan Information Storage Association.

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