Dan Botez

Dan Botez is the Philip Dunham Reed Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM). His research interests are primarily concerned with highpower spatially coherent lasers and intersubband-transition, quantum-confinement semiconductor lasers. He co-invented the first active-photonic-crystal laser for spatial-mode selection and control in wide-aperture (>100mm) devices (1988), the intersubband quantum-box laser (1997), the surface-emitting laser
with central grating π phaseshift (2000) and the deep-well quantum-cascade laser (2003).

Botez is co-founder of Alfalight Inc., Madison, Wisconsin, USA. Before joining UWM, he worked at TRW Research Center and RCA David Sarnoff Research Center. Botez is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE, and he was awarded the “Doctor Honoris Causa” degree by the Polytechnical University of Bucharest, Romania (1995). He was elected a Technical Fellow of TRW and was selected as the Photonics Society’s Outstanding Young Engineer (1984). He also received the 1979 RCA Outstanding Achievement Award.

He has served on the IEEE/Photonics Society Board of Governors and as general co-chair of the IEEE/OSA 2007 CLEO meeting. In 1984, he co-founded the IEEE/Photonics Society Semiconductor Laser Workshop, which is now held annually. He has published four book chapters and 270 journal papers; he has given about 80 invited and plenary presentations; and he holds 47 patents. He received BS (with highest honors), MS and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

He received the Nick Holonyak, Jr. Award in 2010.