OSA elects Philip H. Bucksbaum as 2012 vice president

San Jose, CA--Members of the Optical Society (OSA) have elected Philip H. Bucksbaum of Stanford University as its 2012 vice president. This year’s election also named three directors at large: James D. Kafka of Spectra-Physics, Byoung Yoon Kim of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and Jun Ye of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado.

In his upcoming role as vice president, Bucksbaum makes a four-year commitment to OSA’s Board of Directors. Then, he will automatically become president-elect in 2013 and then the society's president in 2014, followed by a one-year term as past president.

Bucksbaum has been an active OSA member for more than 20 years, including holding leadership roles on several conference program committees and technical meetings, as well as on the Board of Directors. Bucksbaum previously served as the program co-chair for OSA’s Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference (1997) and general co-chair from (1999), and was chair of OSA’s Short Wavelength Topical Meeting in 1992. On the Board, he served as a director at large from 2006-2008 and sat on the Board’s Finance Committee during that time.

Bucksbaum received his A.B. degree in physics from Harvard University in 1975, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980. Following a postdoctoral year at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, he joined the staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, first as a postdoc at Holmdel, and later as a member of the technical staff at Murray Hill. He was appointed professor of physics at the University of Michigan in 1990, where he became the Otto Laporte Collegiate Professor in 1998 and the Peter Franken University Professor in 2005. In 2006, Bucksbaum moved to the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, and in 2009, he became the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science. He has joint appointments in the Physics Department, the Applied Physics Department, and the SLAC Photon Sciences Department, and he served as department chair of Photon Science (2007–2010). He is the director of the Stanford PULSE Institute for Ultrafast Science, and he also directs the Chemical Sciences Research Division at SLAC. Additionally, Bucksbaum has more than 200 publications. He has contributed to several areas of atomic physics and ultrafast science, including strong-field laser-atom interactions, Rydberg wave packets, ultrafast quantum control, and ultrafast X-ray physics.

Along with Bucksbaum, the new directors at large, Kafka, Kim, and Ye, will begin their terms on Jan. 1, 2012, replacing three outgoing members of the Board of Directors. They will hold their positions for three years.

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