Nominations for the Photonics100 2025 have now closed. Thank you to the hundreds of nominators who took part.
Now entering its third year, The Photonics100 2025 will once again group together the leading names in optics and photonics; celebrating the innovators, boundary-pushers, disruptors, out-of-the-box thinkers and R&D rockstars who are driving industry growth and innovation.
The list of nominations is now being assessed by our internal judging panel, led by our chief operating officer Mark Elliott. We will be in contact with our shortlisted nominees imminently, before revealing the final list this winter.
Who is included in The Photonics100?
Nominations were grouped into the following four categories:
Photonics vendors includes the key people from suppliers and integrators of photonics components and systems such as optics, lasers, sensors, test and measurement, optoelectronics, illumination and imaging.
Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) using photonics includes integrators that use photonics as an enabling technology in vertical markets like life sciences, defence, automotive, aerospace, mechanical engineering, electronics, semiconductors and optical communications.
Start-ups includes leaders at companies less than five years old, and operate as either a photonics vendor or OEM (both defined above).
Academia & Research includes either individuals involved in photonics research itself or those using photonic technology to further their research in a non-photonics field such as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, engineering and more.
Previous Photonics100 honourees
The Photonics100 is not only about past achievements, It also stands as a stage for those whose work requires particular attention in the future, too. Honoured in The Photonics100 2023 as the leaders of the ‘Femtosecond Fieldoscopy’ independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, for example, Hanieh Fattahi said “Frequency-comb spectroscopy and field-resolved spectroscopy are opening new eras in sensitive detection.”
This year, Fattahi’s team went on to develop a technique that speeds up the spectroscopic analysis process, offering the advantages of “simplifying the label-free imaging of fragile specimens, real-time environmental monitoring and open-air diagnostics of toxic and hazardous gases.”
2023’s Photonics100 also recognised Daniel Pérez-López as co-founder and CTO of iPronics, who continued to impress, securing €3.7m funding earlier this year to bring software-reconfigurable photonic processors to market with fellow iPronics founder and fellow Photonics100 honouree (2024), Jose Capmany.
The 2024 iteration of The Photonics100 also included Thorlabs Crystalline Solutions’ manager, Garrett Cole, who quickly went on to become a named Optica Fellow for “advancements in precision metrology.”
