Pavel Cheben: The 2025 SPIE Maria Goeppert Mayer Award in Photonics

Pavel Cheben is a principal research officer at the National Research Council Canada, and currently holds honorary and adjunct appointments at six universities in Canada and Europe. Over the past three decades, Cheben has established a global reputation for his groundbreaking research in optics and photonics. His contributions include inventing the subwavelength metamaterial waveguide, and pioneering advancements in photonic integrated circuits for wavelength multiplexing, spectrometry, and sensing. This research has impacted a wide array of applications, ranging from telecommunications and data center interconnects to health diagnostics, autonomous vehicle navigation, and astrophotonics. His many achievements include his creation of a metamaterial silicon waveguide that marked the inception of a new academic and technological field: metamaterial integrated photonics. His contributions to silicon photonic spectrometers opened avenues for real-time sensing and digital health monitoring through wearable devices and smartwatches. And his invention of a two-dimensional array of surface grating couplers became a cornerstone technology, enabling modern on-chip optical phased arrays for sensing applications and the lidar industry.

An SPIE Fellow, Cheben is also a fellow of the IEEE, the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Engineering Institute of Canada, the European Optical Society, the American Physical Society, the UK’s Institute of Physics, and an International Fellow of the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering. He has been active at SPIE conferences since 2007, sitting on the conference program committee of SPIE Photonics West OPTO’s Smart Photonics and Optoelectronic Integrated Circuits, as well as chairing OPTO’s Integrated Optics: Devices, Materials, and Technologies, and SPIE Optics + Optoelectronics’ Integrated Optics: Design, Devices, Systems, and Applications, among other leadership roles. Since 1996, Cheben has published his research with SPIE across more than 150 conference presentations, proceedings, and journal articles.

“I have known Professor Pavel Cheben for more than 30 years, initially as my PhD student and then as a researcher in my group, the Interdisciplinary Group for Optical Computing at the Complutense University of Madrid,” says the university’s Emeritus Professor at the Department of Optics Maria L. Calvo. “He is a strong scientific collaborator and is highly respected in the scientific community internationally. In addition to his many technical achievements, Professor Cheben has participated in numerous activities oriented to motivate new optics and photonics programs, in particular for developing countries. In 2014, I invited him to act as co-director of the International Center for Theoretical Physics’ Winter College in Optics, an annual activity oriented to the training of young researchers and students from all over the world. With contributions such as these, Cheben has influenced a whole new generation of researchers in various areas such as integrated optics, silicon photonics, subwavelength nanophotonic structures. He continues to serve as an inspirational example of the original scholarly thinking and a source of discoveries that influence our worldwide community.”

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Read more about Pavel Cheben and the SPIE Maria Goeppert Mayer Award in Photonics.