PEREGRINATIONS ON THE STUDY OF THE OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF NONSPHERICAL PARTICLES

Abstract

Dr. Ping Yang is University Distinguished Professor and holds the David Bullock Harris Chair in geosciences at Texas A&M University (TAMU), where he currently serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. He previously served as Department Head of Atmospheric Sciences (2012-2018) and Associate Dean for Research (2019-2022) in the College of Geosciences at TAMU. Dr. Yang has supervised/co-supervised 30 doctoral dissertations and 20 master’s degree theses. He has published 366 peer-reviewed journal papers, thirteen invited book chapters, and four books. His publications have been cited 24,144 times (Google Scholar)/15,974 times (Web of Science) with an H-index of 79 (Google Scholar)/62 (Web of Science), as of 26 Sept 2023. His research focuses on light scattering, radiative transfer, and remote sensing. Since joining TAMU, Yang has been extramurally funded for 83 research projects. Yang is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), OPTICA (formerly the Optical Society of America), The Electromagnetics Academy, the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Yang received a number of awards/honors, including the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (2017), the Ascent Award by the AGU Atmospheric Science Section (2013), the David and Lucille Atlas Remote Sensing Prize by AMS (2020), and the van de Hulst Light-Scattering Award by Elsevier (2022), and a university-level faculty research award (2017) bestowed by The TAMU Association of Former Students (AFS). Dr. Yang was an elected member of the International Radiation Commission (IRC) under the International Association of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (2012-2020) and was appointed as one of the 16 members of the U.S. National Research Council-Space Studies Board's Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space (October 2018- June 2022). He has served as an editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences (2015-2020) and currently serves as an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer and an editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres. Dr. George W. Kattawar is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics & Astronomy and the Institute of Quantum Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is an internationally renowned expert in radiative transfer and light scattering dealing with full Mueller matrix/Stokes vector processes. He has made significant contributions in using radiative transfer in such diverse areas as biomedical optics, planetary atmospheres, cloud and aerosol property studies related to climate studies, invisibility cloaking, ultrashort laser propagation in water, and anthrax detection. To list just a few among his seminal contributions, he was the first to show that the clouds of Venus were not water, which was the view held by two eminent scientists Carl Sagan and Richard Goody. It was this seminal work which led to the ultimate determination of the Venus cloud composition. He is one of the first researchers to apply Monte Carlo techniques to radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres. This technique is now being used by researchers all over the world and is also now being used in medical physics. He gave the first correct explanation of the “Ring effect” which had remained an enigma for over twenty years. This paper was designated by a world-renowned scientist at NASA to be the best paper of the decade in atmospheric science. Dr. Kattawar and his collaborators developed one of the most powerful time dependent, three-dimensional Monte Carlo codes capable of handling full Mueller matrix solutions for a coupled atmosphere-ocean system with a fully stochastic interface. This code will become the “Gold Standard” for all future researchers in biomedical, atmospheric, and oceanic optics. He is one of the first to show that nonspherical objects can be made totally invisible if the optical properties are selected in the right way. Dr. Kattawar received many awards and recognitions, including Fellow of the Optical Society of America (1976); Amoco Foundation Teaching Excellence Award (1981); Teacher/Scholar Award (1990), Nils Gunnar Jerlov Award (2014), and van de Hulst Light Scattering Award (2015); He was also elected for two, three-year terms on the Committee on Recommendations for U.S. Army Basic Scientific Research under the National Research Council. He is a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans and a former Associate Editor of the Journal of Transport Theory and Statistical Physics. He was selected to be editor of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Milestone Series on “Multiple Scattering in Plane Parallel Atmospheres and Oceans: Techniques”. He was selected (2009) to serve on the External Advisory Board of the Stevens Institute of Technology to assess their engineering and science programs. He was appointed as Academic Advisor of the Board of Directors of the Texas Academy of Science. He was selected by Applied Optics as one of the 50 most prolific authors in the last 50 years.