Biography
Andrew Weiner is the Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and of the National Academy of Inventers and was selected as a Department of Defense National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow. Weiner presently serves as Editor-in-chief of Optics Express, an all-electronic, open access journal publishing more than 3000 papers a year emphasizing innovations in all aspects of optics and photonics, and previously served a three year term as Chair of the National Academy’s U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Meeting. After Prof. Weiner earned his Sc.D. in electrical engineering in 1984 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined Bellcore, at that time a premier telecommunications industry research organization, first as Member of Technical Staff and later as Manager of Ultrafast Optics and Optical Signal Processing Research. He joined Purdue as Professor in 1992, and has since graduated close to 40 Ph.D. students. Prof. Weiner has also spent sabbaticals at the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Ultrashort Pulse Spectroscopy, Berlin, Germany and at JILA, University of Colorado and National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado.
Prof. Weiner’s research focuses on ultrafast optics, with a focus on processing of extremely high speed lightwave signals and ultrabroadband radio-frequency signals. He is especially well known for his pioneering work on programmable generation of arbitrary ultrashort pulse waveforms, which has found application both in fiber optic networks and in ultrafast optical science laboratories around the world.
Prof. Weiner is author of a textbook entitled Ultrafast Optics, has published eleven book chapters, over 300 journal articles, and over 500 conference papers, and is inventor of 18 U.S. patents. In past years he chaired the Conference on Lasers and Electro-optics (CLEO), the International Conference on Ultrafast phenomenam, and the Gorden Research Conference on Nonlinear Optics and has served as Treasurer and on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-otpics Society (now the IEEE Photonics Society). His numerous awards include the Hertz Foundation Doctoral Thesis Prize, the Optical Society of America’s Adolph Lomb Medal and R.W. Wood Prize, the International Commission on Optics Prize, and the IEEE Photonics Society’s William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award and Quantum Electronics Prize. At Purdue he has been recognized with the inaugural Research Excellence Award from the Schools of Engineering, the Provost's Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor Award, the Herbert Newby McCoy Award for outstanding contributions to the natural sciences, and the College of Engineering Mentoring Award.
