Chia Wei “Wade” Hsu, winner of the IEEE Photonics Society’s Young Investigator Award for 2024. (USC Viterbi Photo)
Chia Wei “Wade” Hsu, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is the recipient of the 2024 Young Investigator Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Photonics Society.
The Society recognized Hsu for his “seminal work on bound states in the continuum in optics and for breakthroughs in computational electromagnetics and imaging,” making him the first person from USC to receive this honor. Read more about the award and see the past winners.
The award citation refers to three distinct contributions: The first was made during his PhD work, when Hsu discovered that light could be perfectly confined even in an open system. That discovery, published in Nature in 2013, launched the study of “bound states in the continuum” in optics into an active research area.
In 2022, Hsu proposed a new numerical method that can solve Maxwell’s equations much faster, by several orders of magnitude. This breakthrough, published in Nature Computational Science, is the second contribution recognized by the IEEE Photonics Society.
The third contribution refers to his current work, in which Hsu is developing a method to see through opaque structures like skin and bone, with micron-scale resolution, using digital reconstruction and digital wavefront correction. Hsu is collaborating with Brian Applegate and John Oghalai at the Keck School of Medicine of USC to apply this method to image the human cochlea, and they were recently awarded the Nemirovsky Engineering and Medicine Opportunity (NEMO) Prize to carry out this study.
The IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award recognizes researchers who have made “outstanding technical contributions to photonics” prior to their 35th birthday. Hsu will officially receive the award at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-optics (CLEO) held May 5-10 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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Published on February 22nd, 2024
Last updated on February 29th, 2024
