IEEE Photonics Society honors Kats with 2020 Young Investigator Award

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Photonics Society has selected Mikhail Kats, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and Dugald C. Jackson Faculty Scholar at UW-Madison, as its 2020 Young Investigator Award honoree.

The society cited Kats’ “contributions in the fields of nanophotonics and optical materials, especially for metasurfaces, optics with phase-transition materials, and thermal-emission engineering.”

Kats has earned numerous honors since arriving at UW-Madison in 2015, including an Air Force Office of Scientific Research young investigator award in 2017 and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2018. The American Society for Engineering Education included him on its “20 under 40” list in 2018, while Clarivate Analytics named him a highly cited researcher that same year.

Kats will receive his award at the CLEO conference and exhibition in May 2020 in San Jose, California.