Bahaa Saleh

Bahaa Saleh has been Dean of CREOL, The College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, since 2009. He served as Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University (1994-2008), and as Deputy Director of the NSF Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems, an NSF Engineering Research Center (2000–2008).

He received the Ph.D. degree from the Johns Hopkins University in 1971 and held faculty and research positions at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, Kuwait University, Max Planck Institute in Germany, the University of California-Berkeley, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Columbia University, the University of Vienna, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he served as Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (1990 to 1994).

Saleh’s research area spans a broad spectrum of topics in optics and photonics including coherence and statistical optics, nonlinear optics, quantum optics, and image science. He has made significant contributions to each of these areas and his publications include more than 600 journal papers and conference proceedings, as well as 3 books: Photoelectron Statistics, (Springer, 1978); Fundamentals of Photonics (Wiley, 1991, 2nd edition, 2007, with M. C. Teich), and Introduction to Subsurface Imaging (Cambridge, 2011).

He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Optical Society of America A(1991–1997) and is the founding editor of OSA’s Advances in Optics and Photonics (2008–present).

Saleh is Fellow of IEEE, OSA, SPIE, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the recipient of OSA’s Beller Award for outstanding contributions to optical science and engineering education, SPIE’s BACUS award for contribution to photomask technology, the 2006 Kuwait Prize for contributions to optical science, and OSA’s Distinguished Service Award.