Professor Mordechai Segev, a photonics scientist from Israel’s Institute of Technology, Technion, has been awarded the 2014 Israel Prize for his contribution to the field of photonics.
The prize was awarded by Israel’s Minister of Education, Rabbi Shai Piron. After Segev had been presented with the award, Technion president, Professor Perez Lavie, congratulated and thanked him for the 'great honour he has brought to Technion.'
The reasons for selecting Sergev were revealed in a statement from the award committee: ‘Professor Segev is a ground-breaking physicist in the field of optics and lasers. His pioneering contributions are sources of inspiration and his scientific work is referenced in thousands of scientific articles.’
Segev and his research group from the Faculty of Physics use non-linear optics to study the basic phenomenon taking place within the realm of non-linear physics. Over the past decade, Segev and his research partners have published five articles in scientific journal Nature, and many other articles in Science magazine, Nature Physics, Nature Photonics, Nature Materials, and physics journal Physical Review Letters.
Sergev completed his undergraduate degree at Technion’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and continued on a direct doctoral study track. He carried out postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology in the USA and then joined Princeton University, where he became a full professor in a record time of 4.5 years.
In the Nineties and early 2000s, Sergev studied the behaviour of solitons, and made significant discoveries in areas ranging from optofluidics to photonic lattices and waves’ propagation in random media. In 2007 he received the prestigous European Physics Society (EPS) Quantum Electronics Award, which was presented in Munich, Germany.
