SPIE has announced the newly elected officials to the SPIE leadership team, which now includes Prof. Daewook Kim, of the Wyant College of Optical Sciences. Prof. Kim was elected as one of four new Society Directors. He will serve a three-year term with SPIE from 2024-2026. Prof. Kim says of the honor, "Thank you for letting me represent you on the SPIE Board of Directors. Let’s work together, take care of each other, and make it happen." Congratulations, Prof. Kim!

Synopsys, a developer of the industrial standard optical design software, CODEV, recently announced the winners of the Robert S. Hilbert Memorial Optical Design Competition 2023. The Wyant College of Optical Sciences undergraduate team, Carolyn Hokin, Shriniketh Sreevatsan, Adam Wan, Yiran Xie and Mina Yoo won the top award. The team, a group of classmates in their senior year at the Wyant College, received an award for their OPTI340 final optical design project, titled “Compact Relay for Image Steering in Augmented Reality."

In demonstration of his research ability, recent alumnus, Joseph Cox, PhD; was awarded a SMART SEED Grant. This grant is awarded to a subset of PhD SMART Scholars and awards research grants up to $100,000 per year for a maximum of three years to SMART scholars who are transitioning from their PhD programs into DoD civilian researchers.

Wyant College PhD student, Jay Kueny, facilitated a group project as part of the Warrior Scholars Project (WSP), July 24-28. During the project, Jay said, "I introduced the basic principles of interferometry and helped the students build their own interferometer setups in the junior teaching lab. Many fringes were seen and counted this week. The veteran participants kept saying how much they were looking forward to lab time each day, and I felt that by the end, they truly understood the basic concepts behind interferometry! A couple of them also mentioned how they are now interested in studying optics!"

Matt Eichenfield
SPIE Endowed Chair in University of Arizona’s Wyant College of Optical Sciences and a Distinguished Faculty Joint Appointee at Sandia National Laboratories

In this talk, Professor Eichenfield will discuss his groups’ work in using this property in specially designed microsystems to radically enhance the  performance of and enable completely novel functionalities in two very different classes of microsystems.

The Wyant College of Optical Sciences is pleased to welcome three new faculty hires for Fall 2023, and one new faculty hire for Spring 2024. Wyant College of Optical Sciences Dean and Professor Thomas L. Koch welcomed the new faculty saying, “We are thrilled to have Dr. ElKabbash, Dr. Seyler, Dr. Soh and Dr. Sinha joining us at Wyant College of Optical Sciences. These extraordinary individuals will bring exciting new dimensions to our research program and curriculum, providing new opportunities and insights to both our students and external stakeholders.”