Herbert Winful

In November 2022, Winful was inducted as a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (GAAS).

In January 2021, he was a recipient of the University of Michigan North Campus Deans' MLK Spirit Award, given to those "who exemplify the leadership and vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."

Having published more than 130 journal articles and supervised the research of PhD students, Winful is himself the recipient of many awards, most recently the 2020 IEEE Photonics Society Quantum Electronics Award, which he was given "for pioneering the field of nonlinear optical periodic structures and for foundational contributions to nonlinear dynamics of semiconductor laser arrays".

Anis Haffar, "Ghanaian engineering professor wins 'Quantum Electronics Award'", Education Matters, 16 July 2020.

A close colleague at the University of Michigan was Gérard Mourou, who in 2018 was co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of a technique known as Chirped Pulse Amplification.

Winful is also a musician, during his Cape Coast school days playing rhythm guitar in a pop band, as well as organ in church. He continues to play the piano recreationally — including the music of Bach, Chopin and Brahms, as well as his own compositions — and has said: "It is my greatest joy, next to my work." Winful performed one of his own original compositions at a party attended by some two hundred people in celebration of Gérard Mourou's 2018 Nobel win, and also honoured Mourou with the gift of a piece of Kente cloth.

In 1987 Winful took up the post of associate professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) department at the University of Michigan, and was promoted to become a full professor in 1992, then a year later promoted to an endowed professorship as Thurnau Professor.

Winful was born in London, England, to Margaret Ferguson Graves, a teacher, and Herbert Francis, an engineer. Winful grew up in Cape Coast, Ghana, where he attended Catholic Jubilee School and St Augustine's College. In 1975 he earned a BS in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (where he was mentored by Hermann A. Haus), followed by an M.S. in Electrical Engineering (1977) and a PhD in 1981 from the University of Southern California. From 1980 to 1986, Winful was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at GTE Laboratories in Waltham, Massachusetts, conducting research in fiber optics and semiconductor laser physics.

Herbert Graves Winful (born 3 December 1952) is a Ghanaian-American engineering professor, whose numerous honours include in 2020 the Quantum Electronics Award. He is the Joseph E. and Anne P. Rowe Professor of Electrical Engineering, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan.