Lawrence elected as senior member of Optica
Mark Lawrence recognized for outstanding contributions to optical community
Mark Lawrence, assistant professor of electrical & systems engineering in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named a senior member of Optica, an international organization at the forefront of the optics and photonics field.
Optica’s Class of 2026 Senior Members include 76 individuals recognized by the organization’s board of directors for their outstanding professional accomplishments and experience in optics and photonics.
Lawrence’s expertise lies in uncovering novel optical phenomena as well as building new optical systems and devices to make an impact across a range of industries, from telecommunications and computing to quantum information and medicine. His lab is harnessing breakthroughs in nanoscale engineering to push the limits of light-based technologies, targeting applications ranging from all-optical computing and quantum communication to economical machine vision and biosensing. Focusing particularly on control of free-space optical signals, his work draws from several subwavelength photonic design concepts, including metamaterials, metasurfaces, photonic crystals, plasmonics and silicon photonics, as well as a range of material platforms and characterization techniques, such as 2D materials, semiconductors, pump-probe microscopy and nonlinear spectroscopy.
Lawrence joined the WashU faculty in 2021 after completing postdoctoral fellowship work at Stanford University. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
