Kehar Singh

Kehar Singh served as a faculty member of IIT Dehi during the period 1965-2011 in various capacities including Head Physics Dept. and Dean Postgraduate Studies and Research IITD. As an academic visitor at the Imperial College London during 1969-1970, he carried out research on partially coherent imaging, and on holography at the NPL, Teddington, UK. He served as CLUSTER Chair at the EPFL, Lausanne in Dec.2002. Presently, he is Honorary Professor in the ‘Optics and Photonics Center’ IIT Delhi where he interacts and collaborates with faculty and students.

As a researcher and educator, he created infrastructural facilities at the IITD in his area of interests, namely photorefractive nonlinear optics, dynamic and digital holography and speckles, optical correlators, holographic storage, and optical cryptography, with a common aim of applications in optical information processing. He mentored 31 doctoral and 80 M. Tech. (Appl. Opt.) students, and has published extensively, having authored or co-authored nearly 300 peer reviewed research papers and approximately 75 review articles in books and journals.

Prof. Singh served as Assoc. Editor, Optics Express (2015-2021); Int’l advisory member, Editorial board of Optical Review (Japan, 1994-2008); Member editorial boards: Optics & Lasers in Eng. (1999-2006); and J. Optics (India/Springer,1974- to date). He also served as a chair or member several international conferences. Besides having served as a consultant to some industries and organizations, he has also been a consultant on security holograms to state Governments in India and served as a member of the Executive Committee, National Photonics Program DRDO.

Prof. Singh’s awards and honors include: S. S. Bhatnagar Prize, Galileo Galilei Award, OSI Award, and Golden Jubilee ‘Distinguished Service’ Award. He is a Fellow of Optica, SPIE, INAE, and Distinguished Fellow of OSI. Singh served as President OSI (1991-1994); Director, II Winter College in Optics (ICTP, Trieste, Italy (1995); Chairman, Research Council, IRDE Dehradun (2013-2018); and Member RC, NPL New Delhi (2017-2021). In 2025, he received Optica’s Emmett N. Leith Award, “For extensive contributions to diverse aspects of optical encoding for security and cryptography, digital holography, correlators and optical storage systems.”