I have previously expressed my vision that JOSA B should support early career researchers in our field [1]. I am therefore pleased to announce our new prize as a next step toward this goal.

The prize recognizes a student or early-career researcher (within five years of earning their highest degree) who is the first author of a paper that a committee of JOSA B editors judges to be outstanding. I chaired the selection committee, which comprised topical editors Antonio Agnesi and Qingqing Liang, who represent a range of topics across the scope of the Journal. We had the difficult but rewarding task of identifying a winner from among all the papers published in the Journal in 2021 based on criteria including the scientific significance, quality, and presentation of the results.

The inaugural winning article, “Starting dynamics of a linear-cavity femtosecond Mamyshev oscillator,” was written by Yi-Hao Chen from Cornell University, USA, and his colleagues [2]. It reports a novel approach to creating high-intensity ultrafast pulses in a reliable and fully electronically controlled manner using a fiber laser. The laser system shows excellent performance, a high degree of stability, and may offer lower cost and complexity relative to existing methods. The selection committee felt that the thoroughness of the study, the clarity of presentation, and the significance of the work for both fundamental laser science and state-of-the-art applications of fiber lasers were particularly impressive.

Yi-Hao Chen

Yi-Hao Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Physics at Cornell University, USA. He received his B.S.E. in Materials Science in 2014 and M.S. in Physics in 2016 from National Taiwan University. His work includes a variety of topics, from electronically starting non-self-starting high-energy fiber lasers to efficiently generating wavelengths relevant to three-photon imaging.

Please join us in congratulating Yi-Hao on his selection as the winner of the 2021 JOSA B Emerging Researcher Best Paper Prize!