Two Wyant College of Optical Sciences Alumnae Honored at SPIE Photonics West
Jannick P. Rolland: The 2025 SPIE A. E. Conrady Award in Optical Engineering
Jannick Rolland (OSC PhD 1990) is the Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics. Additional university roles include a professorship in the Center for Visual Science, and the founding directorship of the Center for Freeform Optics, an industry/university cooperative research center in partnership with the National Science Foundation and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She is also the director of Rochester’s R.E. Hopkins Center for Optical Design and Engineering. Over her career, Rolland has developed numerous novel optical-engineering solutions across a wide range of fields. These include designing the optics for SPOT4, an Earth-monitoring satellite in orbit from 2008-2013, and developing mathematics to describe the “lumpy background” noise that plagues medical images, which gave rise to a widely adopted method to assess image quality in diagnostic instruments. In the last ten years, she has addressed a key challenge in AR/VR with a novel type of optical component, the metaform, and has inspired the broad adoption of freeform optics in imaging systems. Freeform systems are of increasing importance in AR/VR systems, spaceborne systems, and man-portable systems. Rolland is also CTO and co-founder of LighTopTech, a biotech company that commercializes sub-cellular resolution Gabor-domain optical coherence 3D microscopy, a technology which she invented.
Read more about Rolland's Acceptance of this Award
Katherine Creath: The 2025 SPIE Chandra S. Vikram Award in Optical Metrology
Katherine Creath (OSC PhD 1985), a consultant at Optineering, is one of the most influential people in the field of optical testing of the past 40 years. Highly active as a researcher, consultant, scientist, author, mentor, trainer, and conference organizer, she utilizes and propagates optical testing, optical metrology, and optical design for scientific and industrial applications ranging from the microscopic to the telescopic. She has also been held in high regard from the earliest days of her career: “I have known Kathy Creath since she became a graduate student at the University of Arizona,” wrote the late, legendary optics leader James C. Wyant. “She approached me about becoming one of my students and I checked around to find out more about her, and Rudolf Kingslake told me she was one of the best students he ever had in his lens-design course at Rochester, so I accepted her.” Once Creath completed her doctorate, Wyant hired her at WYKO, where she helped develop the company’s line of phase-shifting interferometers. Creath went on to pioneer many novel methods in optical testing, including phase-measuring interferometry, two-wavelength interferometry along with low-light-level metrology, and quantitative phase measurement of living biological cellular systems.