4/6/2010 Celia Elliott
Bardeen Professor of Physics and of Electrical and Computer Engineering Paul G. Kwiat will receive the 2010 Tau Beta Pi–Drucker Eminent Faculty Award of the College of Engineering. The award will be presented on May 3 at 6:00 p.m. at the National Center for Computer Applications Building.
Written by Celia Elliott
Bardeen Professor of Physics and of Electrical and Computer Engineering Paul G. Kwiat will receive the 2010 Tau Beta Pi–Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award of the College of Engineering. The award will be presented on May 3 at 6:00 p.m. at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications Building during the annual College of Engineering faculty awards ceremony.
Kwiat is an AMO experimentalist, a world expert in quantum optics and quantum information science. Using photons to investigate a range of topics from the foundations of quantum mechanics to quantum cryptography, advanced quantum communication, and optical quantum computing, Kwiat has done pioneering research on the phenomena of quantum interrogation, quantum erasure, and optical implementations of quantum information protocols. He is a primary inventor of the world's first two sources of polarization-entangled photons from down-conversion, which have been used for quantum cryptography, dense-coding, quantum teleportation, entanglement distillation, and most recently, optical quantum gates.
Kwiat received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. After two years as a Lise Meitner Fellow with the quantum optics group at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), he went to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as an Oppenheimer Fellow. In 1998, he became a technical staff member in the Neutron Science and Technology group of Physics Division at LANL.
In 1998, Kwiat was awarded the LANL Fellows Prize for his work on optical studies of quantum information. In January 2001, he joined the faculty at the University of Illinois as the second Bardeen Chair. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the recipient of the 2009 R.W. Wood Prize of the OSA.
About the Drucker Award
The Tau Beta Pi–Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award recognizes faculty in the College of Engineering who have received national or international acclaim for dedication to academic excellence through teaching and research and who have made exemplary contributions to the understanding of their fields. The award demonstrates the ideals of Daniel C. Drucker, dean of the College of Engineering from 1968 to 1984. An internationally recognized scholar in the field of applied mechanics and materials, Dean Drucker's pursuit of scholarly excellence had great influence on the faculty and students of the college. He worked with and supported many programs of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society.