Seth Bank, professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineer at The University of Texas at Austin, was one of 109 members from 24 countries to be elected as an Optica Fellow (formerly Optical Society of America OSA) for outstanding contributions to business, education, research, engineering, and service to Optica and our community.
Fellows are Optica members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. The Fellow Members Committee, led by Chair Takunori Taira, RIKEN / IMS, Japan reviewed 240 nominations submitted by current Fellows. The new Optica Fellows will be honored at the Society’s conferences and events throughout 2023.
Prof. Bank was honored for "For pioneering work on the growth of optoelectronic materials by molecular beam epitaxy."
Seth becomes the seventh current Texas ECE faculty member to be elected as an Optica Fellow. He joins professors Ray Chen (2000), Al Bovik (2007), Andrea Alù (2014), Mikhail Belkin (2016), Dan Wasserman (2019), and Xiuling Li (2020).
Dr. Seth Bank is a professor and holds the Cullen Trust for Higher Education Endowed Professorship in Engineering #6 in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.
He received the B.S. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 2003 and 2006 from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. In 2006, he was a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 2007.
His current research interests are centered on the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth of analog/digital alloy semiconductors (e.g. AlInAsSb) and metal/semiconductor hetero- and nano-structures (e.g. ErAs nanoparticles in GaAs) and their application to plasmonics, silicon-based lasers, avalanche photodiodes, mid-IR lasers, sensors, THz generation and sensing, high-speed computation, and quantum information processing. He has coauthored >400 papers and presentations in these areas.
He is a Fellow of IEEE. His group has received 5 Best Paper Awards and he has received the 2008 Young Investigator Award at the North American MBE Conference (NAMBE), a 2008 Young Faculty Award from DARPA, the 2009 Young Scientist Award from the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS), a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2009 (nominated by ARO), an AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award in 2009, an ONR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award in 2010, and a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Award from the NSF in 2010.
He has been the Program Chair of the AVS North American MBE meeting (NAMBE), as well as a Program and General Chair for the IEEE/OSA Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optical (CLEO) and the IEEE Device Research Conference (DRC). He is currently a Board Member of IEEE DRC and was a Steering Committee member of OSA/IEEE CLEO.
