Optica, the premier professional society for optics and photonics, has selected Drexel Engineering alum Robert Devlin (BS electrical engineering/MS materials science & engineering ‘13) to receive their prestigious Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award for 2025. This award is given in recognition of significant early career contributions to optical engineering, lens design, or metrology.
Devlin is the CEO and co-founder of Metalenz, a company that is at the forefront of developing meta-optical technologies, including revolutionary new forms of lenses and sensors for phones. In their award announcement, Optica recognizes Rob’s “critical contributions to foundational optical metasurface design, his pioneering leadership to commercialize metasurface optics, and product development of the first polarization sensor for consumer markets, leveraging semiconductor foundries for mass production.”
By combining multiple lenses and components into one flat device, Metalenz’s 'meta-optics' are adapting sophisticated optical technology, traditionally confined to scientific and medical labs, to a wide variety of robotic, automotive and consumer electronic applications. To date, their commercialization efforts have resulted in more than 100 million metasurfaces within IoT and consumer markets.
In 2020, when he was recognized as one of Drexel’s 40 Under 40, Devlin remarked on how his Drexel experience contributed to his career success. “Drexel gave me a lot of practical hands-on experience through the co-op program,” he explained. “One co-op was completed in College of Engineering Professor Steve May's group, where I had a chance to get first-hand experience in investigating complex research questions while learning from the graduate students around me. All of this real experience put me in a great position to succeed as a doctoral student of physics at Harvard and ultimately helped me in forming Metalenz.”