Optical Materials Express (OMEx) has entered into its eighth year of publication. Throughout its relatively short lifetime, the Journal has attracted submissions from a wide range of optical as well as materials scientists, at all stages of their careers. As an emerging forum for interdisciplinary research in current and emerging topics, we wanted to particularly recognize the work of emerging researchers who publish in OMEx.

We are therefore delighted to announce the introduction of a prize to recognize the best paper from an early-career researcher or student, and its inaugural winner. The prize recognizes a student or early-career researcher (within five years of earning his/her highest degree) who is the first author of a paper that a committee of OMEx editors judged to be outstanding. The selection committee is chaired by Deputy Editor Juejun Hu, and consists of associate editors representing a range of topics across the scope of the Journal. They were responsible for identifying a winner from among all the papers published in 2017 based on criteria including the scientific significance, quality, and presentation of the results.

The winning paper, “Harnessing nonlinearities near material absorption resonances for reducing losses in plasmonic modulators,” written by Christian Haffner from ETH Zurich, Switzerland and his colleagues, demonstrates a novel way to enhance the performance of electro-optic devices by operating near the absorption resonances of the nonlinear medium [1]. The selection committee was particularly impressed by the thoroughness of the study and the clarity of the presentation.

Christian Haffner received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in electrical engineering from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany in 2012 and in 2013 respectively, ranking first in his Masters class. During his studies, he held a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. In 2014, he moved to ETH Zurich, Switzerland and started working towards his Ph.D. in the group of Juerg Leuthold, and he defended his Ph.D. thesis in 2018. His research focuses on plasmonic-based active devices and the challenge of making them a viable and practical solution for optical communications.

Please join us in congratulating Christian on his selection as the winner of the 2017 Optical Materials Express Emerging Researcher Best Paper Prize!