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I am delighted to inform you all that Professor Prem Kumar has been elected to the Fellow grade of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) "for the development of nonlinear optical devices for communication networks." This will be effective January 1, 2003. Election to the Fellow grade is one of the highest honors one can receive from IEEE. This brings the total number of IEEE Fellows in the department to 7 (out of 30 faculty). The other Fellows of IEEE in our department include: Prith Banerjee, Abraham Haddad, Michael Honig, Aggelos Katsaggelos, Martin Plonus, and Allen Taflove.
Professor Prem Kumar has been in the news recently for his research with Professor Horace Yuen in the area of quantum cryptography. Under a $4.7 million DARPA grant, they have recently demonstrated a new high-speed quantum cryptography method codenamed "AlphaEta" that uses the properties of light to encrypt information into a form of code. The current prototype can encrypt data moving at 250 Mbits/ second. A second-generation model that can encrypt the 2.5-Gbit/s streams typical of Internet backbones will be developed within five years.
The news has appeared in a variety of places such as:
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20021111S0036
http://www.eprairie.com/news/viewnews.asp?newsletterID=4317
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-965957.html?tag=fd_top
Please join me in congratulating Professor Prem Kumar on these well-deserved honors.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
Professor Manijeh Razeghi gave an invited colloquium seminar entitled, "Artificial Eyes Based on Semiconductor Quantum Devices: Inspiration from Nature," at the Department of Physics, University of Missouri-St. Louis, on November 15, 2002. She also gave an invited seminar entitled, "Next Generation of Infrared Multispectral FPAs," at the Department of Physics, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, on November 18, 2002.
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .