OCTOBER 22--Peter Knight of Imperial College in London, England, beat two other candidates in an election and will serve as vice president of the Optical Society of America (OSA: Washington, DC;www.osa.org) next year, president elect in 2003, and president in 2004. This is Knight's second big appointment in recent months: in August he became head of the physics department at Imperial.
Knight, who is currently a 'director at large' of the OSA, says that he has three main aims for his time in office. First, to make sure the society is fully international in all its activities; second, to ensure that the society's journals remain affordable and maintain their scientific quality; and third to ensure that the society manages the huge success of the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) conference and exhibit. This show was attended by more than 37,000 people last year.
Knight points out that about one-third of the society's 14,000 members work outside the United States. In addition, the society's premier journal, Optics Letters, currently publishes more papers by European authors than by American authors.
Knight has published more than 350 papers on theoretical quantum optics and quantum information and is head of the quantum optics and laser science group at Imperial.
