Robert Alfano, Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering at CCNY and recipient of the IEEE Photonics Society's international laser award.
Dr. Robert R. Alfano, Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering at The City College of New York and one of the world’s pre-eminent researchers in the field, is the recipient of the IEEE Photonics Society’s (IPS) 2024 Laser Instrumentation Award. The honor is for Alfano’s “discovery of supercontinuum light source as an enabling technology for diverse applications and tunable Cr4 and Cr3 lasers," IPS said. He’ll receive the award at the 2024 IEEE Photonics Conference, Nov. 10-14, in Rome, Italy.
Karen A. Mergner, the Society’s senior governance and awards administrator, said the Laser Instrumentation Award recognizes key contributors to the field for developments of laser-based and electro-optical instruments, “which lead to the development of innovative systems enabling major new measurements or process capabilities of relevance to applications in industrial, biomedical, avionic and metrology fields.”
The Supercontinuum laser source has been used in diverse applications in various areas of Science and Engineering.
The IEEE Photonics Society is the professional home for a global network of engineers and scientists who represent the photonics community.
In addition to Alfano’s research in supercontinuum, he has been focused on using ultrafast and steady state spectroscopy and optical properties of materials for direct measurements of optical phonon, vibrations, spin relaxation time, hot carrier effects, inter valley scattering in semiconductors and decay routes of vibrations in organic liquids.
In biology and biomedical optics areas, his research has involved measuring primary events vision and photosynthesis under light excitation. He has pioneered in the field of optical biopsy by contributing to the development of methods to detect cancer using Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy and two photon microscopy and methods to improve optical imaging in scattering media (tissues, fog and clouds). He introduced the concept of Ballistic and Snake-like photons propagating random scattering media with carry information.
Most recently, he explained the mechanism for higher harmonic generation (HHG) and attosecond laser pulses using universal EM Optical Kerr effect using n2 for odd HHG and n1 for even HHG frequencies.
A member of the CCNY faculty since 1972, Alfano is founding director of CUNY’s CCNY-based Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers (IUSL) established in 1984. He’s raised $63M in photonics research funding over the years
Alfano holds 133 patents and has author credits on more than 730 research articles. His work has been cited in other papers more than 49,500 times and H-index of 105. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow as well as a fellow of APS, Optical Society of America (OSA), IEEE and the New York Academy of Sciences.
His honors include the OSA Charles Hard Townes Award (2008); the SPIE Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award (2012); the APS Arthur L Schawlow Prize in Laser Science (2013); the OSA Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award (2016); Inventor of Year from ENYIPLA (2018); and the SPIE Gold Medal (2019).
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