Cai shares this honor with his co-author, Vladimir M. Shalaev of Purdue University, for their book entitled Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications, published by Springer Press in 2010. They will be presented with this award at SPIE Optics+Photonics 2014, to be held August 17-21 in San Diego. This honor is presented to the author(s) of the most influential scientific or technical book on optics published in the last six years, and it is judged by the impact that it has had on research, teaching, or the optics business.

Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications covers basic aspects and recent advances in the study of optical metamaterials, artificially structured materials with nanoscale inclusions and strikingly unconventional properties at optical frequencies. Important recent developments and applications such as super lenses and cloaking devices are among the topics discussed in the book, which will be of interest to both newcomers and advanced researchers in this rapidly evolving field.

A member of the ECE faculty since 2012, Cai leads the Laboratory for Advanced Photonics and Optoelectronics and also holds a joint appointment with the School of Materials Science and Engineering. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials at Stanford University. Cai received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in 2000 and 2002, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2008, all in electrical/electronic engineering.