Prize Winners

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David R. Williams, Director of the Centre for Visual Science;
Nicholas George Professor of Optics at the Institute of Optics;
Professor of Ophthalmology at the Flaum Eye Institute, University of Rochester, New York;
Research Professor (on leave of absence) / Affiliated Researcher at the Institute of Optics (CSIC).

Susana Marcos, who holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Salamanca (her thesis supervisor was Pablo Artal, also a recipient of the Jaime I Prize), is a pioneering researcher in the development of optical technologies for the diagnosis and treatment of the most prevalent eye conditions (myopia, presbyopia and cataracts, amongst others), technologies which she has actively transferred to clinical practice and industry. For three years she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, under the supervision of Professor Stephen Burns. On her return to Spain in 2000, she founded the CSIC’s Visual Optics and Biophotonics Laboratory, which she has led for more than two decades, at the Institute of Optics, a centre she also directed between 2008 and 2012.

She is the author of over 200 publications in the leading journals in the fields of optics, ophthalmology and neuroscience (with over 16,600 citations and an h-index of 71), and co-inventor of 27 patents, many of which have been licensed to companies in the ophthalmic optics sector. She is also the founder of the start-up companies Plenoptika and 2EyesVision. Among other honours, she has been awarded the ICO Prize by the International Commission for Optics, the Research, Innovation and Technology Prize from the Royal Spanish Society of Physics–BBVA Foundation, an honorary doctorate from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and Technology, the Ramón y Cajal Medal from the Royal Society of Sciences, and the Adolph Lomb, Edwin Land and Edgar Tillyer medals from Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America).