Maria L. Calvo
Summary
Prof. Maria L. Calvo earned her degree in Physics from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM, Spain) in 1969. She began her career at Philips in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, working in quality control for glass fabrication, focusing on surface quality and stress analysis. She later became a research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, where she continued studying the optical properties of glass and amorphous materials—specifically glass microhardness and Rayleigh light scattering—and earned a Doctorate Diploma from the University of Paris VI in 1971.
In 1972, she joined the Optics Department at UCM as an assistant professor under Prof. Armando Durán, initiating theoretical research on light scattering by defects in isotropic media. She earned her PhD with honors on this topic in 1977, became an associate professor in 1981, and was appointed Chair of Optics in 1999. From 2006 to 2010, she served as Head of the Department of Optics.
Prof. Calvo has held visiting positions at institutions including Bremen University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Missouri–St. Louis, the National Research Council of Canada, and the Institute for Optics and Electronics (INAOE, Mexico). She has supervised or co-supervised ten PhD dissertations and has been deeply engaged in undergraduate and graduate teaching.
In 1983, she founded the Interdisciplinary Group for Biooptics at UCM, later evolving into the Interdisciplinary Group for Optical Computing (GICO-UCM). The group’s research spans optical and image processing, optical tweezers, microscopy, holography, and neutron optics. She has authored more than 200 scientific publications, books, and book chapters in both English and Spanish. Her work also extends to the history of optics, particularly the early use of lenses and mirrors in ancient civilizations, in collaboration with the late Prof. Jay M. Enoch. She authored Alhazen: The Pioneer of Light. Alhazen and His Book of Optics, exploring the contributions of the 11th-century Arab scientist.
Prof. Calvo has been a prominent figure in the International Commission for Optics (ICO), serving as Vice President (1999–2002), Secretary-General (2002–2008), President (2008–2011), and Past-President (2011–2014). She has collaborated with the European Union’s Directorate-General for Research and Technology in Brussels, the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP, Trieste, Italy), and Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation.
She is a Fellow of OPTICA (formerly OSA), SPIE, and the European Optical Society (EOS), as well as an Honorary Member of SEDOPTICA and the Portuguese Society for Optics and Photonics (SPOF). In 2011, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Russian-Armenian University.
Algorithms & Analysis of Algorithms Computational Science Electronic, Optical & Magnetic
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