Opto-Electronics Materials, Devices and Systems

Professor Kowel has served on the faculties of Syracuse University, the University of California, Davis, and The University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he served as Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering ('90-'97) and Interim Dean of Engineering ('97-'98). He spent the '82-'83 academic year as a Visiting Professor at the National Nanofabrication Facility at Cornell University. Dr. Kowel came to the University of Cincinnati as Dean of Engineering in May, 1999, and resigned that post to return to faculty status as Professor of Electrical Engineering in September 2004.

Professor Kowel has collaborated in multidisciplinary research devoted to the synthesis, deposition, characterization, and opto-electronic applications of organic and polymeric thin films. The applications were focused on silicon-surface photonics, including liquid crystal displays, electro-optical modulators and massively parallel optical communication among microprocessors. Devices studied included electro-optical modulators fabricated as multilayer, etalon (interferometric cavity) planar structures.

Another structure of interest has been the liquid crystal adaptive lens, a device capable of electronic control of optical beam focus and image position without mechanical motion. This device makes use of a computer-controlled array of electrodes in a liquid crystal cell to adjust the optical phase delay across a wavefront. The principal application currently being studied is focusing reading/writing beams in a three-dimensional optical memory.

Currently, Dr. Kowel continues to work to develop a true real-time, three-dimensional, auto-stereoscopic display for simulation and visualization, especially for biomedical applications.