Congratulations to Fringe Metrology and PhD student, Joel Berkson, for winning the Tech Launch Arizona (TLA) Liftoff Award at the recent IdeaFunding Event on Nov. 9, part of TENWEST. Joel shared about the award, "I'm really looking forward to graduating and working on Fringe full-time. I think we have a lot to offer in our unique approach to precision 3D scanning. I can't wait to become a part of the growing Optics Valley!"

Congratulations to Dr. Amit Ashok and Dr. Mark C. Phillips who were elected as 2024 Fellow Members of Optica. Fellow membership in Optica is limited to no more than ten percent of the membership and is reserved for members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics.

Congratulations to Wyant College of Optical Sciences PhD student, Lindsey Wiley, for her 2023 Best Student Paper Award at the 2023 US Workshop on the Physics and Chemistry of II-VI Materials. Lindsey presented her paper, "Collective Summary of the Extended SWIR (eSWIR) Band: Tradeoffs and Applications" in the third Session focused on Devices.

Douglas Lanman
Senior Director of Display Systems Research
Reality Labs Research, Meta

How can a display appear indistinguishable from reality? We describe how to pass this “visual Turing test” using AR/VR headsets, emphasizing the perceptually driven joint design of optics, display components, rendering algorithms, and sensing elements.

Mohan Sarovar
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Sandia National Labs

The Quantum Algorithms and Applications Collaboratory (QuAAC) is a group of scientists at Sandia National Laboratories working to answer the questions, "what might quantum computers be used for?" and "what kinds of verifiable advantages might they offer over conventional classical computers?". In this talk, I’ll briefly introduce QuAAC and go over some of the research directions we are currently pursuing.