Outstanding Dissertation Award

Dr. Zhongqi Pan's graduate student Yi Weng has just received the 2015 Richard and Mary Neiheisel Endowed Dissertation Award, which consists of a one-time honorarium award of $1000. Yi Weng received his B.S. degree in optical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2009. He graduated from Louisiana State University in 2012 with M.S. degree in quantum communication. He joined UL Lafayette Systems Engineering Ph.D. program since 2012, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the William Hansen Hall Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He worked at NEC Labs (Princeton, NJ) in summer 2014 and summer 2015. His present research interests include Optical Fiber Communications, Nonlinearity in Few-mode Fibers, MIMO Digital Signal Processing (DSP) algorithms, Nyquist WDM signal generation, as well as fiber optic sensors. So far he has published over 25 journal and conference papers related to photonic devices and their system applications. He is a reviewer of IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, Elsevier Optics Communications, Optical Fiber Technology, MDPI Photonics, etc. He also serves as the conference events officer in the executive committee of OSA technical group in fiber modeling and fabrication.