Dr. María J. Yzuel

Dr. María J. Yzuel was a Full Professor of Optics at this Department from 1983 to 2011. Formerly she was a Professor of Optics at the Universities of Zaragoza and Granada, Spain. She is a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, and a Correspondent member of the Academies of Sciences of Granada and Zaragoza, both in Spain. She earned her Physics degree and Ph. D. Degree from the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She was a postdoctoral visitor (1967-1968) at the University of Reading, UK, with a scholarship from the British Council. 

She has worked in diffraction image theory, image quality evaluation, apodization, applications to photolithography, optical pattern recognition, color information in correlators, design of filters. She also worked in medical optics and in liquid crystal panels applied in diffractive optics. She has published more than 250 papers, and she has supervised 20 Ph. D. Thesis. 

She is a Fellow member of the SPIE (The International Society for Optics and Photonics), the Institute of Physics (IOP), the OSA (Optical Society of America), the EOS (European Optical Society), and Socia de Honor of the Spanish Optical Society (SEDOPTICA) and the Spanish Royal Physics Society (RSEF). She served as President of SEDOPTICA from 1993 to 1996. She was Vice President of the Spanish Royal Physics Society. She was Vice President of the International Commission for Optics from 1990 to 1996 and from 2011 to 2017. She served in the SPIE Board of Directors from 2001 to 2003 and from 2007 to 2011. She has served in several SPIE and OSA (now OPTICA) Committees. She was the SPIE 2009 President. She was a member of the Board of Directors of COSCE (Confederación de Sociedades Científicas Españolas) (2015-2019). 

In 2005 she received the SPIE Board of Directors Award and the Medal of the University of Warsaw. She received the Award of Commander of the Civil Order of King Alfonso X the Wise from the Ministry of Education in 2013. She has received other awards, among them the Medal of Physics given by the Spanish Royal Physics Society and the BBVA Foundation in 2014, the Gender Equality Award (Premi igUAltat) of the University of Alicante in 2017, and the SPIE President Award in 2021. She became Doctor Honoris Causa from the University Miguel Hernandez of Elche in 2012 and Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Granada in 2017. 

In 2015 she was the President of the Spanish Committee for the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies. Since 2017 she is the President of the Spanish Committee for the International Day of Light.