Joseph Braat receives the Holst award medal from TU/e Rector Frank Baaijens
Joseph Braat, professor emeritus ImPhys receives the Holst award medal from TU/e Rector Frank Baaijens. The Holst Memorial Lecture Award Committee nominates prof.dr.ir. Joseph Braat for his important contributions in the field of Imaging Optics. Joseph Braat provided essential contributions that enabled, but reach far beyond optical recording (e.g. CD, DVD).
These can be seen as a scientific and technological base for some of the technologies that would launch the successes of the so called Brainport Eindhoven region, including Imaging Optics in Wafer Steppers that drives Moore’s law in the Semiconductor Industry. His work still proves to be important for new ventures in Digital Pathology, Automotive Lighting and Smart Lighting.
43rd Holst Memorial Lecture Award
This year's Holst Lecture will be the 43rd since 1977. The Holst Lecturer will join the ranks of eminent scientists and/or Nobel laureates like Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Hendrik Casimir, Ilya Prigogine, Arno Penzias, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Heeger, John Craig Venter and Shuji Nakamura.
The first Holst Memorial Lecture was given in 1977 to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. With support from Philips Research, the Holst Lecture given by a most eminent scientist in a selected research domain to an audience consisting of university staff, students, representatives from industry and other guests with a general interest in science and technology became an annual tradition. Candidates for the Award are selected by a committee under the chairmanship of the Rector Magnificus of the TU/e, the CTO of Royal Philips and the CEO of Signify research.
Gilles Holst
The general theme chosen for these lectures reflects the important contribution of Dr. Gilles Holst (1886-1968) to the development of research and technology in the Netherlands: 'the development of applied science, particularly mathematics and the natural sciences, for the benefit of industry on the one side and their implications for society on the other.'
In his own academic career Holst played an essential part in the discovery of superconductivity by Nobel laureate H. Kamerlingh Onnes, whilst working at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. However, Gilles Holst will be first and foremost remembered as the founding director of the famous 'Nat Lab', the Philips Physics Laboratory in Eindhoven, where he worked between 1914 and 1946. During his lifetime, Gilles Holst was chairman of two committees that were instrumental in establishing the University of Technology in Eindhoven in 1956.