Sam Thurman
Sam was a Postdoctoral Fellow, then a Research Associate, and finally an Assistant Professor (research) in the Institute of Optics in our Group. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Optics from the University of Rochester in 1996 and his Ph.D. in 2003. From 2003-2004 he was a post-doctoral fellow, and from 2005-2007 was a Reserch Associate in the Institute of Optics. His Ph.D. thesis, under G. Michael Morris, was on guided-mode resonant filters. He is currently developing an image quality equation taking into account the aberrations of a telescope. He has also worked on a theory of, and reconstruction algorithms for, imaging Fourier transform spectrometers which work with sparse-aperture telescopes, and on phase retrieval algorithms.
He joined Lockheed-Martin-CTI in Louisville, CO, in April 2009.
Seung-Whan Bahk
Seung-Whan was a Research Associate with the Institute of Optics in our group and the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) at the University of Rochester. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan where he worked on adaptive optics and focal field characterization under Gerard Mourou. He graduated from Han-Yang University, South Korea in 1997 with a BS in EE. His work involved the Focal Spot Diagnostics project in the new Omega EP system at LLE.
He is currently a member of the staff at LLE.
Dianne Lancia
Dianne worked in our group as an MS student in the Institute of Optics. She joined Raytheon in California in 2008.
Brijesh Prithviraj
Brijesh was an unofficial member of the group in the late 2000’s, while a graduate student in Physics and Astronomy working on forming 3-D distributions of optical intensity to control particles at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE).
Nathan Clark
Nathan was a graduate student in Biomedical Engineering. He received the B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering, concentrating in optics from the University of Rochester in 2004 and his PhD in Biomedical Engineering in 2013. He has participated in the REU program summer of 2001 and 2002. His PhD thesis: “Microscope Characterization using Phase Retrieval Applied to Determine the Spatial Distribution of Membrane-Associated Proteins in Hematocytes” was jointly supervised by (primary) Prof. Richard Waugh in BME and (secondary) J.R. Fienup in Optics. Click here for Nathan’s research page.
Derek Pulhamus and Ryan De Rosa
Derek and Ryan were undergraduate Optics majors at the University of Rochester. Both worked during the Summer of 2005 in our group under the Research Experience in Optical Science and Engineering for Undergraduates (REU) program.
Richard Marron
Richard Marron worked in our group during the summer of 2009. He is a Rochester native and an undergraduate Electrical Engineering and Computer Science major at Duke University. He worked during the summer of 2009 on developing and characterizing phase screens for use in experiments on atmospheric turbulence.
Krista Lombardo
Krista worked in our group the summer of 2010 while an undergraduate. She was a University of Rochester Physics and Astronomy major from Albany, N.Y. During the summer of 2010, she worked on finding methods for phase unwrapping and assisting Abbie Tippie in her research on coherent lensless imaging. She later went to Penn State University for an advanced degree in civil engineering.
Abhishek Kumar
Abhishek received his MS degree from the Institute of Optics in 2011. He earned his B.tech (Hons.) in Electrical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur, India in 2009. His MS thesis: “High Resolution Lensless Coherent Imaging” (April 2011).
He joined the PhD program at the Center of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at the Medical University of Vienna.
Daniel Pamplin
Daniel was a graduate student in the Institute of Optics. He earned a B. S. in physics from Abilene Christian University in 2011. His undergraduate research involved motor controls for a small time projection chamber at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as robustness testing for phase retrieval algorithms at Ball Aerospace. Over the summer of 2012 he continued the research he began at Ball and also simulated hyperspecral images for another project.
Brandon Dube
Brandon was an undergraduate student in the Institute of Optics. He received his undergraduate degree in the Institute of Optics in May 2018. Between freshman and sophomore year, he co-founded Olaf Optical Testing, a startup company that develops test procedures and instrumentation for camera lens systems. His senior thesis is on the use of tangential and sagittal MTF data to perform wavefront sensing. His current research interests include freeform optical design and metrology and wavefront sensing. He joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Yaocheng (Sparrow) Tian
Sparrow was an undergraduate student at the Institute of Optics and graduated in December 2021. He had worked at Aktiwave LLC as a research assistant on femtosecond laser optical fabrication and characterization, before joining here. He likes hiking, cooking, and automobiles. His current research interest is on comparison of phase retrieval algorithms for effective image reconstruction. In January 2022, he entered the MS program in The Institute of Optics and defended his MS thesis, “Fourier phase retrieval problem: further understanding and algorithm comparison,” in April, 2023. In September, 2023, he joined the PhD program at MIT, in the 3D Optical Systems Group.
Heriniaina Rajaoberison
Heri was an undergraduate student at the Institute of Optics and graduated in May 2022. During his junior year, he co-founded Advanced Growing Resources with his fellow Handler Scholars after winning Swarm Starter, the school’s biggest business competition. His current research is on wavefront sensing, using machine learning, for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Heri is interested in computational imaging and phase retrieval. In the Fall of 2022, Heri joined the PhD program at California Institute of Technology.