2015 van de Hulst Award winners
George W. Kattawar
Professor Kattawar is Professor Emeritus of the
Physics & Astronomy and Institute for Quantum
Science
and
Engineering
at
Texas
A&M
University. He is an internationally renowned
expert in radiative transfer and light scattering
dealing with full Mueller matrix/Stokes vector
processes.
He
has
made
significant
contributions in using light scattering and radiative transfer in diverse areas as biomedical
optics, planetary atmospheres, cloud property studies related to global warming, invisibility
cloaking, ultrashort laser propagation in water, and anthrax detection, just to mention a few.
Prof. Kattawar’s publications number over 220 and have appeared in many journals in the field
including 33 papers in JQSRT. He has won several awards such as Fellow of the Optical
Society
of
America,
1976;
Amoco
Foundation
Teaching
Excellence
Award,
1981;
Teacher/Scholar Award, 1990. He was also elected for two, three year terms on the Committee
on Recommendations for U.S. Army Basic Scientific Research under the National Research
Council. He was selected by the Texas Academy of Science as the Distinguished Texas
Scientist for the year 2011. His most recent honor was being named to receive the prestigious
Jerlov Award for 2014 which is the highest award presented by the Oceanography Society
sponsored by both ONR and NASA and now was elected to receive the 2015 Van de Hulst
Award for Light Scattering.
Prof. Kattawar is a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans
and a former Associate Editor of the journal of Transport Theory and Statistical Physics. He
was selected to be Editor of the SPIE Milestone Series on “Multiple Scattering in Plane Parallel
Atmospheres and Oceans: Techniques”. He was selected (2009) to serve on the External
Advisory Board of the Stevens Institute of Technology to assess their engineering and science
programs. He most recently was appointed as Academic Advisor of the Board of Directors of the
Texas Academy of Science. He was honored in the April issue of Applied Optics celebrating
their 50th anniversary as fourth of the fifty most prolific authors in Applied Optics. He has also
been a major consultant to the Navy for several secret projects using his radiative transfer
codes to solve problems related to National Defense.
Daniel Mackowski
Daniel Mackowski's primary research activities have been in the areas of
electromagnetic scattering and radiation heat transfer. Additional research
activities included investigations in the areas of aerosol dynamics
(coagulation, transport of small particles in gases), rarefied gas dynamics,
and combustion.
His primary contribution to the topic of electromagnetic scattering has been
to advance the ability to predict the effects of multiple scattering of electromagnetic waves.
Specifically, he developed mathematical and computational techniques to provide exact yet
tractable solutions to Maxwell's time harmonic wave equations as applied to systems with
multiple spherical boundaries. This work has found application in a broad and interdisciplinary
range of topics, ranging from the precise prediction of the effect of particle size and spacing on
the resonant absorption behavior of gold nanospheres, to the development of a theoretical
model for the radar backscattering cross section of the atmospheric aerosol on Titan for use in
the interpretation of measurements by the Cassini probe.
When not working on equations, he spends his time playing the guitar, tending a vegetable
garden, and teaching thermodynamics and heat transfer to mechanical engineering students.