By Agnes Paculdar
Dr. Caesar Saloma, Dean of the College of Science, was awarded the ASEAN Outstanding Scientist and Technologist Award last July 7, 2008 at the World Trade Center in Manila. The awarding took place during the opening of the 8th ASEAN Science and Technology Week, which coincided with the 50th National Science and Technology Week celebration in the country.
Established in the early 1990s by the ASEAN Committee on Science and Technology, the ASEAN Outstanding Scientist and Technologist Award is conferred every three years to the nominee coming from the ten-member ASEAN, who has met the criteria and standards set by the competition, and whose works in the field of science and technology have obtained national and international recognition.
The AOST award specifically cited Saloma’s “outstanding and significant contributions in photonics and signal processing that were accomplished with colleagues and students at the National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman,” and that these efforts “have resulted in the development of novel and cost-effective techniques in optical signal recovery and retrieval.” The citation further gives recognition to his research works “which are consistently published in high impact optics and applied physics journals of the world.”
A member of the National Academy of Science and Technology, Dr. Saloma is the recipient of various national and international awards, which include among others, the prestigious Galileo Galilei Award conferred by the International Commission on Optics and the Gawad Chanselor Award bilang Natatanging Guro (Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Teaching Performance), conferred by the University of the Philippines Diliman. In June 2007, the United States Patent Office awarded a patent to Dr. Saloma, Dr. Vincent Daria and Jelda Miranda of the National Institute of Physics for developing an imaging technique that combines confocal reflectance microscopy and 1P-OBIC in order to produce sharp visual images of semiconductor integrated circuits which is important for failure analysis in the latter. The invention is a major breakthrough in the semiconductor industry and is particularly useful in the manufacturing of microprocessors, integrated circuits and memories for computers, cellular phones and other electronic devices. This technique enables the detection of defects in the circuit, thus ensuring quality control of such devices. The Philippine Intellectual Property Office has likewise issued a Letters Patent for the same invention effective until July 09, 2022.
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo presented the AOST award to Dr. Saloma and to Dr. Liza Ng Fong Poh, a molecular virologist from Singapore, who received the Asean Young Scientist and Technologist Award for her contributions in detecting severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) through the development of a diagnostic kit. In the past, two other Filipinos have won the AOST award, namely, Dr. Lourdes Cruz (2001) of the UP’s Marine Science and Research Institute and Dr. Bienvenido Juliano (1998) of the International Rice Research Institute.
