The 2021 Engineering Achievement Award honoree is José Capmany, “For pioneering and sustained contributions to integrated microwave and programmable photonics including the invention of Field Programmable Photonic Gate Arrays.”

JOSÉ CAPMANY is a Full Professor in Photonics and leader of the Photonics Research Labs (www.prl.upv.es) at the institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (www.iteam.upv.es), Universitat Politècnica de Valencia, Spain. He has published over 550 papers in international refereed journals and conferences and has been a member of the Technical Program Committees of the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) and the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC). He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has acted as a reviewer for over 25 SCI journals in the field of photonics and telecommunications. He is also a founder of the spin-off companies VLC Photonics (www.vlcphotonics.com) dedicated to the design of photonic integrated circuits (recently acquired by Hitachi High Technologies) and iPronics Programmable Photonics, (www.ipronics.com)
dedicated to programmable integrated photonics.

Professor Capmany has received the 2020 National Research Award in Engineering and the 2012 King James I on novel technologies, both considered the highest scientific distinctions in Spain, for his outstanding contributions to the field of microwave and programmable photonics. He is an ERC Advanced Grants Holder and was a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Photonics Society for the 2013–14 term, an associate Editor of IEEE Photonics Technology Letters (2010–2016) and the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology (2016–2018). He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.