Archives: Organizers

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.

Brian Culshaw is professor emeritus at Strathclyde University, where he served as head of department and vice dean, after joining in 1983 as Professor of Optoelectronics. He is also a director of OptoSci limited, a spin out company established in 1994. He has (too) many years’ experience in the technology, realisation and application of fibre optic sensors in navigation, structural monitoring, biomedicine and environmental assessment. He has also participated in conference organisation and professional society activities including as 2007 President of SPIE. He has previously worked at University College London, Bell Northern Research Ottawa, and Stanford and Cornell Universities.

Senior Scientist, NRL and Science Advisor, OSA At OSA, assists in planning meetings and scientific initiatives while at NRL, currently developing sensors for the Department of Navy. Member National Academy of Engineering, fellow of IEEE and OSA. Early developer of numerous fiber sensors and managed several fiber sensor programs.

Senior Advisor and Fellow of Fujikura, and Fellow of IEICE. He has been engaged in R&D of high performance telecom fibers and specialty fibers for sensing. His recent interest is industrial application of optical fiber sensors.

In 1978, Pierre Ferdinand received an MS degree in physics from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), and in 1980 the Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies in plasma physics, followed in 1982 by its PhD in physics from the University of Paris XI based in Orsay. In 1990 he received its State PhD (Doctorat d’Etat es Sciences) from the University of Nice, France. From 1980 to 1992, P. Ferdinand worked at the R&D Division of EDF. During this time, he mainly focused on optical-sensing topics such as stabilized optical sources and several OFSs, as the current sensor based on the Faraday effect in a Sagnac interferometer, and the Polarisation reflectometry (POTDR) for distributed sensing. From 1992 to 2015, as a Director of Research, he leads the Optical Measurement Lab. at CEA LIST (Atomic Energy Commission, Laboratory of Technologies and Systems Integration, France), where his researches include Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBG), and distributed sensing technologies, for industrial applications devoted to advanced Structure Health Monitoring (SHM). He recently joins a French SME involved in OFS for SHM, and remains scientific advisor for the CEA. Ferdinand holds 30 patents and is the author of a scientific book and several book chapters as co-editor, as well as about 200 research publications and communications on OFS and related subjects. He is a fellow of the French Optical Societies (SFO), and member of both the International OFS Conference and the European Workshop on Optical Fiber Sensors (EWOFS) technical committees. Ferdinand can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]