It is our pleasure to announce the 2019 recipient of the JOSA A Emerging Researcher Best Paper Prize. The prize, now in its second year, recognizes a student or early-career researcher (within five years of earning his/her highest degree) who is the first author of a paper that a committee of JOSA A editors judged to be outstanding. The selection committee is chaired by Feature Editor Johannes Courtial, and consists of Topical Editors David Fischer, Irina V. Larina, and Antigone Marino, who represent a range of topics across the scope of the Journal. They were responsible for identifying a winner from among all the papers published in 2019 based on criteria including the scientific significance, quality, and presentation of the results.

The winning paper, “Eigensurfaces of eigenmirrors” [1], was written by Sarah G. Rody from Chestnut Hill College, USA, with her colleagues, Ronald K. Perline and R. Andrew Hicks. The paper introduces and examines the concepts of “eigenmirrors” and “eigensurfaces”: the reflection of an eigensurface in its eigenmirror, when viewed from a prescribed position, looks undistorted compared to the eigensurface viewed directly from a second prescribed position. The origin of these concepts lies in very practical machine-vision considerations that ensure that similar-sized features are recorded on a similar number of detector pixels. In the hands of the authors, however, all of whom are mathematicians, they become optical analogs of the elegant and powerful mathematical concept of the eigenvectors of a matrix. The selection committee was particularly impressed with the originality and elegance of the ideas presented in the paper, and with the assured presentation.

Sarah G. Rody received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Drexel University, USA, in 2017. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Chestnut Hill College, USA. She teaches a wide variety of classes, including Mathematical Modeling, Game Theory, Linear Algebra, Probability and Statistics, and Calculus, in which she integrates her research in optics.

Please join us in congratulating Sarah on her selection as the winner of the 2019 JOSA A Emerging Researcher Best Paper Prize!