Rasheed Azzam, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of New Orleans, is Fellow of the OSA, SPIE, and TWAS: Academy of Sciences of the Developing World (Trieste, Italy). Dr. Azzam received SPIE's 2005 G. G. Stokes Award for exceptional contributions to polarization optics. He served as member of the Publications Council of the Optical Society of America (OSA), topical editor of both Applied Optics and Journal of the Optical Society of America A, and was guest editor of special issues of Journal of the Optical Society of America A, Optical Engineering, Surface Science, and Vol. 27 of SPIE's Milestone Series Selected Papers on Ellipsometry.

Azzam was co-organizer, co-chairman, and proceedings co-editor of several conferences on ellipsometry, polarized light, and optical polarimetry. He was recognized as Outstanding American Inventor by Intellectual Property Owners, Inc., for his four detector photopolarimeter. This invention, which led to the commercial development of the StokesMeter® by Gaertner Scientific, received a Photonics Circle of Excellence Award and one of the R&D 100 Awards.

Dr. Azzam was a Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor at Universite de Provence (France). He holds 5 US patents, and is author or co-author of 3 book chapters and over 275 papers. His monograph Ellipsometry and Polarized Light (published by Elsevier) has been translated to several languages.