Bartels Wins GECCO Gold Medal

Dr. Randy Bartels, ECE assistant professor, continues to earn top honors and recognition for his exceptional work in the field of lasers and nonlinear optics. He received his most recent accolade, the Gold Medal Human-Competitive Award, at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, or GECCO, held June 25-29, 2005, in Washington, D.C.

The GECCO Human-Competitive Awards are designed to recognize outstanding research that has been produced using techniques of genetic and evolutionary computation. Yielding results that are not merely interesting and impressive, but competitive with the work of creative and inventive humans, these techniques are being increasingly adopted by industry to solve real-word problems. Bartels earned the Gold Medal Human-Competitive Award for his paper entitled, "Learning from learning algorithms: Application to attosecond dynamics of high-harmonic generation."

Over the past several months, Bartels also received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Optical Society of America Adolph Lomb Medal. The awards, worth more than $1 million, firmly establish the 30-year-old Bartels as a rising star in his field.

Bartels heads the Colorado State University Laboratory for Ultrafast and Nonlinear Optics. His research concentrates on the generation and control of short laser pulses and their use for the control of quantum dynamics.To learn more about Bartels and his research, visit his web site at www.engr.colostate.edu/ultrafast/.