University of Utah electrical and computer engineering doctoral student Sourangsu Banerji was recently awarded one of three Best Paper awards in Imaging Systems and Applications during the OSA Imaging and Applied Optics Congress in Munich. It is already the third student award he has received in the last year.
“It’s exhilarating. I’m tremendously grateful to work on this hard and interesting topic,” he said. “I’m excited. But there is more we can do. This is the just the start.”
Banerji, who is advised by U electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Berardi Sensale-Rodriguez, wrote the paper on his work involving flat optical lenses and how to make them perform better. The paper (Imaging with flat optics: metalenses or diffractive lenses?) details how these flatter lenses could benefit cellphone cameras by creating lenses that don’t bulge out of the phone and can take pictures in the dark. It was published in the current issue of Optica from the Optical Society of America.
Banerji, who also works in U electrical and computer engineering associate professor Rajesh Menon’s research group, won the Best Poster award last summer from the Sao Paulo School of Advanced Science and XVI Jorge André Swieca School on Non-linear and Quantum Optics in Brazil. And last September, he received the Best Student Presentation Paper award for a different paper from the International Conference on IRMMW-THz in Japan.