Akhlesh Lakhtakia, University Distinguished Professor, is one of five Penn State Faculty to receive the 2004-05 Faculty Scholar Medals for Outstanding Achievement. Established in 1980, the award honors a single contribution or series of contributions around a single theme and was given to Dr. Lakhtakia for his seminal contributions to the study of electromagnetic fields in complex materials and media, which, in the last five years, have culminated in the theoretical and experimental development of sculptured thin films and, in the last year, has led to his theoretical treatise (2004) on the negative-phase-velocity propagation of light in gravitationally affected vacuum.