Mordechai (Moti) Segev is the Robert J. Shillman Distinguished Professor of Physics, at the Technion, Israel. He received his B.Sc. and PhD from the Technion in 1985 and 1990, respectively. He 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.
Moti’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 150 invited, keynote, and plenary presentations at conferences. According to ISI Web of Knowledge, his H-index is 76 with and >23,000 citations, and an average of more than 60 citations per paper (H-index 92, with ~32,000 citations by Google Scholar).
Among his most significant contributions are the discoveries of photorefractive solitons, of random-phase solitons (also called incoherent solitons, or 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, demonstrating the first photonic topological insulator, and the invention of the concept of sparsity-based subwavelength imaging and super-resolution.
Moti Segev is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America – OSA (1997), a Fellow of the American Physical Society – APS (2000). He has won several major international and national awards, among them the 2007 Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physics Society (highest award of the European Physical Society in optics / lasers / quantum electronics), the 2009 Max Born Award of the OSA (most prestigious professional award of the OSA), and the 2014 Arthur Schawlow Prize, which is the highest APS award in lasers physics. On the national level, he has won the 1995 Sloan Research Award in Physics (USA) and the 2008 Landau Prize (Israel).
In 2011, Moti Segev was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in 2014 he has won the Israel Prize in Physics (highest honor in Israel). In 2015, Moti was elected to the National Academy of Science (NAS) as a foreign associate.
On the Technion level, he has won 2003 the Henry Taub Prize for Research Excellence, and twice the Hershel Rich Innovation Award (2007, 2013). Also, in 2008, he has won the prestigious Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) in the first round. He served as the General Chair and Program Chair of several international conferences, and two terms as the Topical Editor on Nonlinear Optics in the premiere optics magazine Optics Letters. In 2009 he served as the General Chair of IQEC (the “fundamentals part” of CLEO), and as the Chair of the Awards Committee of the Quantum Electronics Prize (same award he won in 2007). Also in 2009, he was appointed as Distinguished Professor – the highest rank at the Technion, currently held by only four other professors.
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 19 university professors in the United States (MIT, Princeton, Penn State, University of Florida, and California State University at San Francisco), Germany (University of Hamburg, and University of Jena), Taiwan (National Taiwan University at Taipei), Croatia (University of Zagreb), Italy (La Sapienza), India (IISER Bhopal) and Israel (Technion x6, Tel Aviv University, and Bar-Ilan University). Likewise, many of his former PhD students are currently holding senior R&D positions in the industry.