BARRINGTON, NJ - Edmund Optics (EO) announces that Monash University, Victoria, Australia, has been awarded the top prize of S$5,000 (SGD) in the Edmund Optics University Bursary Program for 2009, part of the Singapore campaign for Southeast Asia. The award was granted to Monash University because of Monash's impressive optical and astronomical research and teaching programs of their School of Physics at their Victoria, Australia location.

Finalists for the award were selected based completing an online entry form where participating universities provided information about their programs in optics and physics, the types of programs their students were engaged in, and the extent to which optics products, systems and assemblies produced by Edmund Optics were useful and valuable to the University's programs, projects and students.

In announcing this year's winner, Edmund Optics also disclosed that next year's winning prize in 2010 would be doubled to S$10,000 (SGD), based on the success and huge response to this year's program.

While announcing the current winner, Clark Harris, Edmund Optics marketing director for Asia, says, "Monash University is most certainly deserving of this award because it is deeply immersed in a range of experiments at their distinguished research facilities, including their new atomic and molecular optics labs, and their partnership with the Australian Synchrotron.

Upon receiving the award Dr Lincoln Turner said, "We are delighted that Edmund Optics has chosen Monash Physics to receive this bursary." Dr Turner intends to invest the bursary in a high-stability HeNe laser to create a new undergraduate lab experiment on quantum noise and optical measurement.

Most recently, Monash appointed a new professor of experimental physics, Professor Kristian Helmerson, formerly of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Washington, D.C.