Person Type: International Honorary Committee

Hervé Lefèvre graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud in Physics and was awarded a Doctorate in Optics-Photonics from the University of Paris-Orsay (France) in 1979. His doctorate research was performed at Thales (formerly Thomson-CSF) Central Research Laboratory and his thesis subject was pioneering work on fiber-optic gyroscopes. From 1980 to 1982, he was a post-doctoral research associate at Stanford University in California, continuing R&D on fiber-optic gyroscopes. In 1982, he came back to Thales Central Research Lab and became head of the fiber-optic sensor team. In 1987, he joined Photonetics, then a start-up, and became director of R&D. In addition to fiber-optic sensors and gyroscopes, the company developed a very successful line of test instruments for optical fiber communications. As the company grew, he moved to the position of Chief Operating Officer in 1999. At the end of 2000, Photonetics was acquired by the Danish group Nettest while its fiber-gyro activity was spun out to create iXSea. Hervé remained in Nettest and managed its Photonics Division. In 2004, he moved to iXCore, the parent company of iXSea, as vice president for R&D with a specific involvement in iXSea’s activity, and became Chief Scientific Officer of iXBlue at its creation in 2010. Hervéwas also president of the European Optical Society for the 2010-2012 period.

Glen Sanders is a Sr. Fellow in Honeywell’s Aerospace Advanced Technology Group, and the Chief Systems Engineer of the Strategic Sensors Group of Honeywell Defense and Space located in Phoenix, Arizona. He is an internationally recognized researcher in the area of fiber optic sensors, and served as the Technical Chair of the 18th International Conference on Fiber Optic Sensors. He has served as a member of the Technical Program Committee and International Steering Committee for over 20 years combined. Glen received his Ph.D. in Physics from MIT in 1983 and has worked at Honeywell a total of 27 years. At Honeywell, he led the original high performance fiber optic gyro effort which led to major applications in precision space platform stabilization, submarine navigation, and other precision guidance. Glen was also a founder of the spin-off company, NxtPhase, aimed at commercialization of fiber optic current sensors for the electric power industry. There he was a recipient of the R&D 100 Award, of R&D Magazine, for one of the top new products of 2002. Glen has approximately 75 US patents, and has authored over 40 technical papers. Glen’s most recent development activity has been in the advancement of next generation optical-resonator sensors, including resonator fiber optic gyros. This exciting new lightweight, small-sized technology could have a major impact in navigation using band-gap guiding fibers, and has applications in chemical, biological, and radiological sensing.

Anna Grazia Mignani, a physicist by training, is Senior Scientist at CNR, the National Research Council of Italy, where she works since 1984. Her work started with designing and experimenting fiber optic sensors and networks for temperature and vibration monitoring, then continued with spectroscopy-based sensors for environmental applications, especially for water monitoring. Her most recent activity focuses on spectroscopy for food applications, especially for multi-analysis of safety, quality, and nutraceutic indicators by means of a single light shot and multivariate processing of spectroscopic data. Her work has been presented to plenary and invited talks worldwide and is published in journal papers, book chapters and conference publications. She managed European and national research grants on applied optical sensing, and holds 9 US and EU patents. She has been visiting scientist in laboratories in Belgium and Ireland, and is serving international funding agencies as expert evaluator, project reviewer, and advisor. She co-chaired and promoted several SPIE conferences on optical sensing, and has been a proponent of women in physics at UNESCO. She is Associate Editor of IEEE-Photonics Technology Letters and of IEEE Sensors Journal, and has served the IEEE Sensors Council as member-at-large. She is SPIE Fellow, and is currently serving SPIE on the board of directors.

After graduating as diploma physicist and Dr. rer. nat., he joined IPHT in Jena, Germany, where he has conducted research in optical fibre sensors since 1986. He was technical co-chair of OFS-17 and OFS-20, he is chairing annual SPIE Smart Sensors conferences (Fellow of SPIE 2011), and he is teaching fibre optics at Jena University of Applied Sciences.

Born in Halle/Saale, Germany, educated in physics in Munich, Germany, and Innsbruck, Austria. R&D work at Siemens on fiber communications, professor at Technical University Berlin in integrated Optics, head of fiber sensor group at Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Freiburg, then CTO at Jenoptik GmbH. Consultant and CEO of neuroConn GmbH (retired).

Kazuo Hotate received the B.E., M.E., and Dr. Eng. degrees in electronics from the University of Tokyo, in 1974, 1976, and 1979, respectively. In 1979, he joined the University of Tokyo as Lecturer. He became Professor in 1993 at Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, and currently is Professor at Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Systems, Graduate School & Faculty of Engineering, the University of Tokyo. He served as Dean of Graduate School & Faculty of Engineering (2008–2010), and also served as Director General of Division of University Corporate Relations (2011–2014), in the University of Tokyo. He is now Executive Vice President of the University of Tokyo. He has been engaged in projection-type holography, measurement and analysis of optical fiber characteristics, photonic sensing, and optical fiber sensors. He has authored and coauthored several books on optical fibers, and more than 450 journal papers and international conference presentations. Prof. Hotate is Fellow of IEEE, Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE), Society of Instrumentation and Control Engineers (SICE), and Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP). He received academic awards, including OFS Life-time Achievement Award, SPIE DSS Life-time Achievement Award, Ichimura Prize, IEICE Achievement Award, SICE Hasunuma Prize, and JSAP Takuma Prize. He was a Board of Governors member of IEEE Photonics Society, and served as a Associate Editor of IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technologies. He served as Co-chairs for SPIE Fiber Optic Gyros: Twentieth Anniversary Conference, Technical Program Committee Chair for 13th International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors (OFS-13, 1999, Kyongju, Korea), and General Chair for OFS-16 (2003, Nara, Japan). He is currently a member of Science Council of Japan.

Eric Udd is President of Columbia Gorge Research, a company he founded to promote fiber optic sensor technology and it application. Mr. Udd has been strongly involved in the fiber optic sensor field since 1977. He has made fundamental contributions to fiber rotation, acceleration, acoustic, pressure, vibration, strain, temperature, humidity and corrosion sensors. At McDonnell Douglas from 1977 to 1993 he managed over 30 government and commercial programs on fiber optic sensors that resulted in products used on the 777 and other commercial aircraft, launch vehicles and spacecraft. In 1993 Mr. Udd founded Blue Road Research working on civil structures, oil and gas projects, aerospace and defense. Blue Road Research was acquired by Standard MEMS in 2000. In January 2006 he began work full time at his second company, Columbia Gorge Research and found new applications in electric power, robotics, and medical applications as well as aerospace and defense. Mr. Udd has 54 issued US Patents with additional applications pending. He has written or co-written about 200 technical papers, chaired more than 30 international conferences on fiber sensors, edited textbooks, including Fiber Optic Sensors: An Introduction for Engineers and Scientists, 2nd Edition, Wiley 2011 and Field Guide for Fiber Sensors, SPIE, 2014 and contributed many book chapters. Mr. Udd is a McDonnell Douglas Fellow, an SPIE Fellow and an OSA Fellow. He was awarded the David Richardson Medal by OSA in 2009 for his work on fiber optic sensors and the field of fiber optic smart structures. Links to resumes of Eric Udd on the web: http://spie.org/profile/Eric.Udd-5824 and https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-udd-7739a34.

David Jackson obtained his PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London, in 1964. His thesis was entitled, “The Measurement of Short Lifetimes of Excited States of Nuclei”. He developed a very fast coincidence circuit, based on avalanche transistors, with a time resolution of 10 ps. Appointed to a lectureship in 1965 at the University of Kent (UKC) and Professor of Applied Optics in 1985, he is now Professor Emeritus. At Kent he initiated a programme to study the interaction of laser light with liquids, solids and gases in a variety of states exploiting Brillouin, Rayleigh and Raman scattering. He developed most of the instrumentation and signal processing for these studies. From 1976-79 he was seconded to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington where he invented the first all optical fibre Mach Zehnder interferometer demonstrating open and closed loop operation with extreme resolution. He subsequently established a fibre optic sensor group at UKC. A range of sensors was developed including: distributed temperature and strain sensors with a sensing range >45km, 10000C temperature probes, sub-micro-gravity accelerometers, subsea current sensing, miniature radiation probes and miniature medical probes for temperature and pressure. In addition he designed and implemented multiplexing techniques for fibre Bragg grating sensors and fibre interferometers. He developed the first fibre laser Doppler anemometer and vibrometer and expanded the applicability of the vibrometer to a multichannel instrument. He instigated OCT research at UKC and built tuneable sources for OCT systems. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics and the OSA and recipient of a lifetime achievement award from EWOFS. He has published more than 650 papers in journals and international conference proceedings.