Sorrells wins 2024 Gold Educational Award from Edmund Optics
The award supports research and education in ultrafast optics
Janet Sorrells, assistant professor of electrical & systems engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, has received the 2024 Gold Educational Award from Edmund Optics.
The Edmund Optics Ultrafast Educational Award supports outstanding undergraduate and graduate optics programs in the STEM fields at nonprofit colleges and universities by providing funds to purchase equipment from Edmund Optics.
Sorrells’ group focuses on technology development in nonlinear optical microscopy. In her research, Sorrells uses ultrafast optics, or short pulses of light, to excite nonlinear optical light-matter interactions, a set of rare light-matter interactions that occur at high optical power. Nonlinear optical light-matter interactions can be used to investigate metabolic, structural and chemical properties of biological samples.
With the award, she plans to purchase equipment to build a pulse shaper device to control the spectral and temporal properties of optical pulses to achieve better tunability and contrast in microscopy. She and her team also will construct a custom system to measure the spectral and temporal properties of their beam to verify that the pulse shaper is working.
She plans to use the system in her lab for a demonstration in her Nonlinear Optical Microscopy course and to provide students with hands-on experience working with ultrafast optics.
