Luca Caucci, OSC Ph.D. candidate and graduate research associate, was nominated for the Outstanding Graduate Student Award by his faculty advisor, Regents' Professor Harrison H. Barrett, who wrote: "Luca is an amazingly diligent and accomplished student. He has a 4.0 GPA. He is an incredible asset to other students in my group, always available to help them understand difficult concepts.

 

"A particular contribution is his assistance in helping others learn to program Sony PlayStation 3 gaming consoles or arrays of graphics processing units (GPUs). Parallel processing on PlayStations is quite difficult, and Luca is the only person in the group who really mastered it.

 

"Luca’s master's thesis was groundbreaking. It developed two new methods for detecting planets around other stars, and it resulted in two first-author papers in prime optical journals. The National Academies of Science and the Keck Foundation held a conference on the Future of Imaging Science, in which 10-person expert groups in different areas met to determine the key new directions in their fields. They knew of Luca’s work through the literature and they had concluded that it was the most promising way of being able to detect fainter exoplanets. This group has recently learned that the Keck Foundation has approved funding in the amount of $50,000 to implement Luca’s master's thesis.

 

"Luca went on to spend two years on a Canon-funded project on the use of maximum-likelihood estimation in optical testing for unit lenses with hundreds of waves of aberrations. Luca invented and demonstrated a new approach to this problem, which we had not anticipated at the beginning of the grant, and he filed a patent disclosure that is now licensed to Canon. In parallel with the Canon work, Luca became deeply involved in the work in the adaptive imaging research group. In one conference paper on which Luca was first author, he demonstrated that the adaptation makes a huge difference in determining whether a tumor has a necrotic core, which would greatly reduce the potential value of radiation therapy.

 

"His Ph.D. dissertation, now well along and likely to be completed this fall, will provide a rigorous answer to the age-old question of how much information can be conveyed by a single photon. The answer, expressed in terms of the differential contribution of that photon to the accuracy with which medical or scientific inferences can be drawn from the image, is surprising. If a single photon is rigorously analyzed and its attributes such as the position where it strikes the detector, its wavelength and its time of arrival are estimated by ML methods, then the photon can convey many bits of information to the physician or scientist. It is reasonable to predict that his work will lead to a large decrease in the radiation dose a patient receives, for example from a CAT scan.

 

"Within the Center for Gamma-Ray Imaging, Luca has played a key role in outreach to our many collaborators around the world. Last December at the Fourth Biennial Workshop on Small-Animal Imaging, with about 75 attendees, Luca gave an outstanding tutorial on high-performance computing using GPUs. He has also worked very directly — and effectively — with other CGRI collaborators, most notably the National University of Ireland, Galway, and the Food and Drug Administration. An important contribution within the College of Optical Sciences is that Luca served on the search committee for a new assistant professor in image science. He approached this committee with characteristic dedication and thoroughness, and his insights were very important in hiring of an excellent new member of our faculty. On campus, Luca and his wife are very involved in activities at the Newman Catholic Center, and they also assist on various student projects at Pueblo High School on the south side.”