Prof Soma Venugopal Rao, School of Physics & ACRHEM, University of Hyderabad (UoH) has been elected as a Fellow of the SPIE (formerly Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers). 

SPIE is an international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technologies which was founded in 1955, connecting, engaging, and serving a global constituency of more than 2,58,000 professionals from 184 countries. It strengthens the global optics and photonics community through conferences, publications, and professional development, bringing together engineers, scientists, students, and industry leaders to advance light-based science and technologies. Inspired by the transformative power of photonics to enhance life around the globe, over the past five years SPIE has contributed more than $22 million to the international optics community.

Prof Venugopal Rao Soma joined as a Reader at the University of Hyderabad in 2007. He later became an Associate Professor in 2010 and Professor in 2013. Prof Venugopal guided 10 PhD students and six more are working in his group.  He has published one book, 10 book chapters, and about 300 papers in refereed journals and international conference proceedings, and presented more than 150 papers in various international/national conferences.

Venugopal Rao was selected as the Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry, UK (2020) and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, London, UK (2019). He was selected as a Topical Editor of the prestigious journal Optics Letters of the Optical Society of America. He is also serving as an Associate Editor for the RSC Advances Journal from the Royal Society of Chemistry, UK since 2016.