Colorado State University Engineering Professor Elected Fellow to American Physical Society, Optical Society of America

Note to Editors: A photo of Professor Carmen Menoni can be found with the news release at http://www.newsinfo.colostate.edu/.

Colorado State University Professor Carmen Menoni, whose tabletop microscope recently won top honors from R&D magazine, has been named a Fellow of two major scientific organizations: the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America.

Menoni joins a select group of colleagues who are chosen by their peers for the distinctive honors.

Fewer than one-half of 1 percent of the 46,000 members in the American Physical Society are named as Fellows. Menoni was honored for "advancing nano-scale imaging using extreme ultraviolet laser light and seminal contributions to understanding the physics of semiconductor optical materials and laser diodes."

The Optical Society of America named Menoni as a Fellow "for contributions to  nanoscale resolution imaging using compact extreme ultraviolet lasers and the understanding of semiconductor optical materials and devices."

Menoni was one of 61 Fellows selected this year by the Optical Society of America. The organization, which has more than 70,000 professional members from 134 countries, promotes the science of light and the advanced technologies made possible by optics and photonics.

"These recognitions clearly demonstrate Dr. Menoni’s important contributions to her field," said Tony Maciejewski, chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State. "She exemplifies the faculty we have in our College of Engineering and at Colorado State University, in general."

In October, R&D Magazine recognized a tabletop microscope developed by Menoni and her team of Colorado State University and Berkeley researchers at the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Science and Technology as one of the Top 100 most significant technological advances for 2008.

The microscope uses light from a unique extreme ultraviolet laser invented at Colorado State by Professor Jorge Rocca and collaborators and specialized lenses created at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Also contributing to the project are scientists from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, who created mirrors used in the microscope.

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