Prize Recipient

Mordechai Segev
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

"For groundbreaking contributions to the study of light-matter interactions, in particular the discovery of optical spatial solitons in photorefractive media, for milestone contributions to nonlinear waves in photonic lattices, and for the observation of Anderson localization of light."

Mordechai (Moti) Segev is a Distinguished University Professor and the Trudy and Norman Louis Professor of Physics, at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He received his B.Sc. and D.Sc. from the Technion, Israel, in 1985 and 1990, respectively. Moti Segev has spent one year at Caltech as a post-doctoral fellow and two more years as a Senior Research Fellow. He joined Princeton in September of 1994 as an Assistant Professor, becoming an Associate Professor in 1997, and a Professor in 1999. In the summer of 1998, Moti Segev went back to his home country, Israel, and joined the Technion, eventually resigning from Princeton in 2000. In 2009, he was appointed as Distinguished University Professor - the highest rank at the Technion, currently held by only five other professors.

Moti Segev's research interests are mainly in Nonlinear Optics, Solitons, Sub-wavelength Imaging, Lasers and Quantum Electronics, although he finds much entertainment in more demanding fields such as basketball and hiking. He has more than 300 publications in refereed journals, many book chapters, and has given more than 100 invited, keynote, and plenary presentations at conferences.

Among his most significant contributions are the discoveries of photorefractive solitons, of random-phase solitons (also called incoherent solitons, or self-trapping of solitons made of incoherent white light from an incandescent bulb), the first observation of 2D lattice solitons, the first experimental demonstration of Anderson localization in a disordered periodic system, and demonstrating the first photonic topological insulator.

Moti Segev is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America – OSA (1997), a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2000). He has won several awards, among them 2007 Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physics Society, the 2009 he won the Max Born Award of the OSA, and the 2014 Arthur L. Schawlow Award of the APS. On the national level, he has won the 2008 Israeli Landau Prize, and in 2011 he was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

However, above all his personal achievements, Moti Segev takes pride in the success of the graduate students and post-doctoral fellows that have worked with him over the years. Among those are currently 16 university professors in the United States, Germany, Taiwan, Croatia, Italy, India and Israel.