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30 January - 4 February 2027
San Francisco, California, US

Photonics West Best Paper and Best Presentation Awards

Honoring outstanding achievement by our researchers

Congratulations to the 2026 Award winners


Recognition Program Awards

Award name Award recipient Paper / Presentation
3D Printing Best Paper Award in LASE Maniewski, Pawel 13874-13, Additive manufacturing of silica gain fibers: challenges and opportunities
3D Printing Best Paper Award in OPTO Kaluza, Mateusz 13899-52, Diffractive optical element-based coupler for multicore fibers fabricated using two-photon polymerization
3D Printing Best Paper Award in BiOS Wasu, Mayan 13842-33, Development of a standardized phantom target and objective evaluation method for 3D vision systems in robotic and endoscopic surgery
Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics Best Paper Award Kaluza, Mateusz 13899-52, Diffractive optical element-based coupler for multicore fibers fabricated using two-photon polymerization
Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics Best Student Paper Award Leites, Leonid 13899-51, Fabrication of customized diffractive optics in under ten minutes using a consumer-grade resin 3D printer
BaySpec Best Presentation Award Chen, Haitao 13862-3, High-throughput automated 3D behavioral profiling of freely swimming zebrafish larvae using a multi-camera array microscope
Best Oral Presentation Awards Zhao, Ruixuan 13865-2, High-speed volumetric voltage imaging in mouse brain with confocal squeezed light field microscopy
Best Oral Presentation Awards Zhou, Haowen 13865-5, Digital defocus aberration interference for autofocusing and digital refocusing in microscopy
Best Oral Presentation Awards Czuchnowski, Jakub L. 13865-9, Modal deconvolution approaches for fast volumetric imaging
Biophotonics in Exercise Science Best Paper Award Pirhadi Rad, Amir Parham 13845-4, Near-infrared spectroscopy enables detection of arterial and venous occlusion of free tissue transfer: a clinical feasibility study
Biophotonics in Exercise Science Best Paper Award Bresci, Arianna 13845-12, Clinical validation of a compact band-pass Raman spectroscopy-based system for intra-skin physiological-level continuous glucose monitoring
Biophotonics in Exercise Science Best Paper Award Rojo, Rodrigo 13845-14, Customized in-ear PPG sensor
QPC Lasers Best Student Paper Award Enghardt, Marie-Luise 13829-9, RamanBioAssay for phenotypic antibiotic susceptibility testing of bloodstream pathogens
QPC Lasers – Hui Liu Best Student Paper Award de Arruda Mazzotti Marques, Maria Júlia 13829-20, In vitro evaluation of the photodynamic inactivation of Rhizopus oryzae
BSC Best Paper Award Stadelmeier, Leo Federico 13824-9, Confirming the European reality: real world experience in a 10-year single center retrospective of HoLEP vs TUR-P: the increasing value of laser enucleations at a high-throughput LUTS center
BSC Best Paper Award Shin, Hwarang 13824-6, Photothermally activated hydrogel system for skeletal muscle repair in stress urinary incontinence
Emerging DMD Based Systems and Applications Best Student Paper Award Subedi, Saroj 13918-2, Solidification model-based dual-objective optimization for dimensional accuracy and green strength in DLP 3D printing
Emerging DMD Based Systems and Applications Best Student Paper Award Wei, Keyang 13918-18, Fast beam steering by resonant drive operation of a pixelated MEMS spatial light modulator
Fiber Lasers Best Student Presentation Award - First Place Wanitschke, Felix 13874-33, Experimental investigations on the relative phase stability in amplifying multicore fibers
Fiber Lasers Best Student Presentation Award - Second Place Schuhbauer, Benedikt 13874-42, Monolithic thulium-based nonlinear fiber amplifier delivering high-energetic pulses
Fiber Lasers Best Student Presentation Award - Third Place Haverland, Nils 13874-51, CO2 laser-inscribed cladding light stripper with homogeneous stripping and attenuation > 37 dB
Free-Space Laser Communications Best Student Presentation Award Bontzos, Alexandros S. 13885-25, Large area Si3N4 grating-assisted Ge photodetectors on a photonic integrated circuit for free-space coupling
Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics Best Student Presentation Award - 2nd Place Wainwright, Alexander 13883-6, Optimizing femtosecond laser interactions towards spatial imaging mass spectrometry
Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics Best Student Presentation Award - Runner Up Komori, Hajime 13883-15, High-accuracy displacement measurements under single-photon-level signal conditions using asynchronous optical sampling with dual-wavelength combs
Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics Best Student Presentation Award - Runner Up Kim, Changmin C. 13883-17, Spatiotemporal control in femtosecond filament assisted remote sensing under atmospheric turbulence
Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics Best Student Presentation Award - Runner Up Rajan, Abhiram 13883-26, MHz piezoelectric phase control in femtosecond laser micromachined photonic circuits
Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics Best Student Presentation Award - 1st Place Mishra, Biswajit 13883-3, High-speed ultrafast laser surgery scalpel: design, validation, and evaluation
Frontiers in Ultrafast Optics Best Student Presentation Award - 3rd Place Perruccio, Lorenzo 13883-29, Directional coupler resonator for laser-written photonic devices
Gabriel Popescu Award Cho, Hyobin 13861-10, Inverse-scattering for joint refractive-index reconstruction and adaptive field-of-view expansion from samples undergoing simultaneous angled illumination and translational motion
LAMOM Best Postdoctoral Oral Presentation Award Yoshizaki, Reina 13880-4, Submicrometer-scale 3D grinding of diamond by ultrashort-pulse laser with in-process interferometric topography measurement
LAMOM Best Student Poster Award Ishide, Kazuma 13880-39, Formation process of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamonds by sub-10 femtosecond laser pulses
LAMOM Best Student Presentation Award Qadeer, M. Akif 13880-10, Femtosecond laser figuring of freeform optics using iterative tool path optimization
Microfluidics, BioMEMS, and Medical Microsystems Best Paper Award Roschelle, Micah 13844-12, Real-time in vivo imaging of therapeutic bio-distribution with a miniaturized implantable fluorescence imager
MOEMS and Miniaturized Systems Best Paper Award Tan, Dawn T. H. 13907-1, Nonlinear optics in ultra-silicon-rich nitride devices
MOEMS and Miniaturized Systems Best Student Paper Award Ghosh, Oindrila 13907-13, Highly-stable and compact immersion micro-optical system for robust photonic integration
Multiphoton Microscopy Best Poster Award Zhao, Shitong 13856-31, Deep and high-speed two-photon volumetric imaging of capillary blood flows with adaptive excitation
Multiphoton Microscopy Best Poster Award Holsenback, Vincent 13856-34, An automated 3D polarization-resolved second harmonic generation imaging system for large scale cardiovascular tissue mapping
Multiphoton Microscopy Best Poster Award Poon, Wesley 13856-35, Spatially resolved label-free multimodal multiphoton imaging reveals inflammation-induced lipid remodeling in triple-negative breast cancer following NOS2 inactivation and COX-2 inhibition
Nippon Electric Glass Best Presentation Award Chandler, Talon 13862-22, Learning the parameters of shift-variant phase and fluorescence deconvolution for high-throughput computational microscopy
Optical Biopsy Best Paper Award Kim, Hyeonwoo 13843-27, Photoacoustic biopsy of the prostate using a micro ring resonator array: feasibility study
Optical Biopsy Best Paper Award Tran, Anh 13843-20, Toward AI-powered miniaturized spectroscopy for biomedical applications
Optical Biopsy Best Paper Award van Zutphen, Robin 13843-2, System design and experimental validation of quantitative imaging single fiber reflectance spectroscopy
Optical Biopsy Best Poster Award Grant, Elliot 13843-57, Spikey nanorattle-based SERS biosensors for direct detection of cancer-associated mRNA
Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine Best Paper Award Morawiec, Seweryn 13837-23, Full-field swept-source optical coherence elastography for rapid volumetric strain imaging
Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine Best Poster Award Rafi M. H., Rameesa 13837-78, Automatic imaging of multiple spheroids by synchronous control of linear sample stage and dynamic OCT instrument
Optical Coherence Tomography and Coherence Domain Optical Methods in Biomedicine Best Poster Award Basheer, Shadil 13837-77, Comprehensive in vivo ultrastructural, morphological, and functional imaging of whole zebrafish using optical coherence tomography
Optical Elastography and Tissue Biomechanics Best Poster Award Zhou, Weiyan 13853-44, Wide-field high-speed space-division multiplexing optical coherence elastography with photonic integrated splitters
Optical Elastography and Tissue Biomechanics Best Poster Award Gonzales, Alana G. 13853-42, Optical coherence elastography for ex vivo detection of human gastric cancer and dysplasia
Optical Elastography and Tissue Biomechanics Best Poster Award Yang, Ronald 13853-49, High-throughput postprocessing for the automation of clinical Brillouin microscopy
Optical Fibers and Sensors for Medical Diagnostics, Treatment, and Environmental Applications Award Bouamra, Arthur 13842-14, Photonic integrated circuits on fiber tips for lab-on-fiber sensing
Optical Fibers and Sensors for Medical Diagnostics, Treatment, and Environmental Applications Award Ito, Hiroto 13842-20, Simplified mid-infrared photothermal deflection spectroscopy for noninvasive biological analysis
Optical Fibers and Sensors for Medical Diagnostics, Treatment, and Environmental Applications Award Dhakal, Ashim 13842-22, Chasing the right to clean water with optics
Optical Fibers and Sensors for Medical Diagnostics, Treatment, and Environmental Applications Award Richter, Maxwell 13842-19, Fiber optic polarimetric stress sensor improvements
OZ Optics Best Presentation Award Shanmugavel, Sibi Chakravarthy 13862-9, Gigavoxel-scale on-chip refractive-index tomography using multi-slice beam propagation
Pascal Rol Award Feng, Guanping 13831-40, Volumetric fluorescent imaging of in vivo single retinal cells using lightfield scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (LF-SLO) with computational aberration corrected depth sectioning
Photons Plus Ultrasound Best Paper Award Luo, Yilin 13851-38, The fastest, clinically validated ultraviolet photoacoustic microscopy for label-free intraoperative tissue assessment enhanced by unsupervised deep learning
Photons Plus Ultrasound Best Paper Award Huang, Hsuan-Kai 13851-46, Joint estimation of a CT-informed skull model and initial pressure distribution in transcranial photoacoustic computed tomography
Photons Plus Ultrasound Best Paper Award Kim, Chulhong 13851-37, Tri-modal photoacoustic, ultrasound, and fluorescence imaging using a transparent ultrasound transducer array in lymphedema patients
PicoQuant Best Paper Award Cheng, Siyang 13858-23, Single-objective lattice light sheet microscopy with microfluidics for improved 3D single-molecule superresolution imaging
Polarized Light and Optical Angular Momentum Best Student Paper Award Khanom, Fatima 13854-16, Optical vortex beams generated by conical refraction for tissue characterization
Polarized Light and Optical Angular Momentum Best Student Paper Award Diamant, Arthur 13854-56, Strategies for correcting plastic cover-induced artifacts in Mueller polarimetric imaging during neurosurgery
Prizmatix Best Paper Award Cierpiak, Kacper 13867-7, Fiber optic sensors for molecular diagnostics of viral diseases
Prizmatix Best Paper Award Hernik, Aleksandra 13867-1, Porous nanoparticle-based optical sensor array for detection of volatile organic compounds
Prospective Instruments Best Presentation Award Siu, Dickson M. D. 13862-37, High-throughput quantitative phase imaging and spinning platform-driven optophysical phenotyping and drug screening
QPI Best Paper Award Fu, Zih-Ying 13861-21, Computational aberration correction for epi-mode intensity-based quantitative phase imaging systems
QPI Best Paper Award Lerner, Joshua F. 13861-3, Extremely high-throughput quantitative phase imaging of live-cells with a multi-camera array microscope
Tokyo Instruments Best Presentation Award Chen, Xuewen Cindy 13862-39, Scalable interferometric microfluidic chamber for high-throughput quantitative phase imaging
VECSELs Best Student Presentation Award Rubin, Trevor A. 13911-8, Optimization of a frequency-doubled MECSEL for on-sky tests as a laser guide-star