Professor Bahaa Saleh, chairman of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, received the Optical Society of America's prestigious Esther Hoffman Beller Award for 1999 in recognition of his contribution to optical science and engineering education. Saleh co-directs (with Professor Malvin Teich and Assistant Professor Alexander Sergienko) the Quantum Optics Laboratory at the Photonics Center, where he is seeking to develop a new source of light in which the photons are entangled. The entanglement or synchrony of the photons in two beams of light can be exploited, Saleh says, to reduce the fluctuations in one beam, resulting in quiet light, which is expected to herald a new era in optical imaging, microscopy, cryptography, and computing.