December 11, 2023

Tom Brown, the director of the Institute of Optics, along with Tina E. Kidger and Emery L. Moore at the Institute’s Industrial Associates meeting this fall. (Photo credit: Jinhong “Mint” Lu)

I’m excited to share important progress in the Wyant Challenge, established last year by University of Rochester life trustee James C. Wyant ’69 (PhD) and his wife, Tammy, to increase faculty at the Institute of Optics by 50 percent. A couple deeply connected to optics donated a generous gift to the University that will be matched by the Wyant Challenge to endow the Kidger-Moore Distinguished Professorship in Optics.

Tina E. Kidger and Emery L. Moore have both been associated with optics for more than 40 years and their connections to Rochester date back more than a century. Emery is a distant relative of Dr. Mott Moore, president of the University of Rochester’s Board of Trustees in the 19th century and a founding figure of Rochester’s park system. Early in her career, Tina met Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake—two of the Institute of Optics’ founding faculty members—and many Rochester students have won the Michael Kidger Memorial Scholarship she annually awards with administrative support from SPIE.

“Tina and Emery have a deep appreciation for the historical roots of the Institute, but an equal appreciation for its present and future prospects,” says Tom Brown, the director of the Institute of Optics and a Mercer Brugler Distinguished Teaching Professor. “Through Tina’s annual Michael J. Kidger Memorial Scholarship, the couple has already recognized many of the Institute’s students. The Kidger-Moore Distinguished Professorship at Rochester is a further investment toward advancing the future of the Institute and the industry. We are extremely grateful to Tina and Emery for the impact that their generosity will have on the future of the Institute of Optics, the University of Rochester, and generations of students to come.”

Read about the vision for the professorship and the couple’s inspiration for the gift on the Advancement website.

LLE HOME TO NEW LASER FUSION RESEARCH HUB

(University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics photo / Eugene Kowaluk)

The Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) has received a four-year, $10 million award from the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Science to lead a national research hub dedicated to advancing inertial fusion energy (IFE) science and technology. The LLE-led inertial fusion energy hub—named IFE-COLoR—is one of only three such hubs in the nation selected by the DOE through competitive peer review.

Housed at Rochester, the IFE-COLoR hub brings together experts from LLE, the University of California–Los Angeles, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the private sector, including Ergodic and Xcimer Energy Corporation. The hub’s coordinated efforts and expertise will focus on determining the scientific and technological underpinnings for a broad-bandwidth, direct-drive IFE laser system—one that could pave the way to building the world’s first fusion power plant.

I’m excited for the new opportunities this hub will bring for Hajim researchers. Read more about IFE-COLoR at the News Center and about all three new hubs at the New York Times.

JIGSAW FALLING INTO PLACE

(Photo credit: Christopher Muir)

Every fall, students in Professor Chris Muir’s ME 204 Mechanical Design course create a large, intricately detailed jigsaw puzzle out the finest Baltic birch plywood, often replicating an iconic symbol of the University. This year the class took inspiration from Golisano Children’s Hospital and their “Sandy and her friends” image.

Each of the students in the class is required to design one of the pieces in CAD (computer assisted design). Each piece has its own unique pattern of wavy edges, requiring students to coordinate with classmates working on adjacent pieces. The interface between the pieces is a semi-randomized Fourier series, a mathematical formulation for waveforms that puts a nice engineering twist to the challenge.

Check out the University’s Instagram account for a timelapse of the students completing the puzzle and a look at the completed design. It looks terrific!

MASUM HASAN GRABS ATTENTION AT FLOWER CITY AI CONFERENCE

(Photo provided)

Masum Hasan, a computer science PhD student advised by Associate Professor Ehsan Hoque, was a featured speaker at Flower City AI, a local conference on artificial intelligence innovation, education, healthcare, art, business, and research. Masum spoke about his work developing the SAPIEN Coach, an interactive, multilingual, emotionally-responsive, virtual-human-based coaching platform for learning academic or soft skills.

The Rochester HCI Lab member caught the attention of a reporter covering the conference. Watch Masum speak at the conference in this story on News 10 NBC. Masum also spoke at length about AI on WXXI’s program Connections with Evan Dawson.

NEWLY FUNDED RESEARCH

William Renninger, left, and Jaime Cardenas, right. (University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)

Congratulations to Will Renninger, associate professor of optics and physics, for securing $776,447 from the Office of Naval Research for a project that is part of the Long Range Broad Agency Announcement Program. The funding supports a project with Associate Professor Jaime Cardenas titled, “Forward Inter-Optical-Modal Interactions with Fundamental Acoustic Modes (FIM-FAM) and versatile high-selectivity RF Photonic devices.”

Have a great week!

Your dean,
Wendi Heinzelman