Professor Magnusson received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Arlington in 1984.  He was Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington from 1998-2001, and he served as Professor and Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut from 2001-2006 and Professor from 2006-2008.  He served as Associate Editor of Applied Optics and Optical Engineering and as General Chair for the Diffractive Optics and Micro Optics Topical Meeting.  With his students and colleagues, Prof. Magnusson has authored more than 300 journal articles and conference papers.  He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and SPIE (International Society for Optical Engineering).  He is a recipient of the IEEE Third Millennium Medal and an elected member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and the Academy of Distinguished Scholars.

His areas of expertise include theory and experiment of periodic nanostructures, nanolithography, nanophotonics, nanoelectronics, nanoplasmonics, optical bio- and chemical sensors, nanofabrication, integrated nanoscale devices, diffractive optics, optical filters, thin-film optics, waveguide optics, holographic interferometry, holographic storage in photorefractive crystals, semiconductor lasers, optical properties of materials, wave propagation in periodic media, and optical signal processing.