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Michael Kidger Memorial Scholarship:
2015 AWARDEE - ERIC SCHIESSER



Tina Kidger and Eric Schiesser
Kidger Scholarship Award Presentation
SPIE.OPTIFAB
Rochester, NY, 13 October 2015

Award Year 2015

The 2015 winner of the Michael Kidger Memorial Scholarship award is Eric Schiesser. Eric received a BS in Physics, magna cum laude, from The University of Rochester in May 2012. He is currently a third year PhD student at The Institute of Optics, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, The University of Rochester under the tutelage of Prof. Jannick Rolland, Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering. Eric entered the PhD program at The Institute of Optics in the fall of 2012. After one year of course work and passing of the preliminary examination he was admitted into the PhD program in fall 2013.

The 2015 Kidger Scholarship award was presented to Eric on 13 October 2015 by Tina E. Kidger at SPIE.OPTIFAB, the Joseph A. Floreano Rochester Convention Center, Rochester, NY, 12-15 October 2015.

One of Eric's current projects relates to packaging optics within the boundaries of a next generation high-power laser used in laser fusion for energy experiments. Within this project, Eric is working to apply the recently established aberration theory of freeform surfaces and methods of optical design to explore innovative solutions to relay the output from the final non-collinear optical parametric amplifier (NOPA5) to the output of the grating compressor in a multi-terawatt optical parametric amplifier line (MTW-OPAL) system.

On another project, Eric has been assigned the lead role to develop a compact spectrometer based on freeform optics for industry. Eric undertook the analysis of the project's prior art in order to better benchmark the next generation system. The first phase of this project has been completed and Eric is now further engaged in the conception and development of a next generation compact spectrometer using freeform optics.

A still further project which Eric leads is the optical design of next generation freeform telescopes for application in the CubeSat space.

Eric Schiesser

Update 2020

Eric finished his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Optics in 2019 under the tutelage of Professor Jannick P. Rolland. Since being named a Kidger Scholar in 2015, he has published four first-author papers as part of his thesis work related to the optical design of rotationally asymmetric reflective optical systems. Two papers, one in Optics Letters in 2018 and another in Applied Optics in 2019, were related to his work at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics developing a test-bed for a terawatt laser relay. Two papers related to the design of reflective freeform telescope designs were published in Optics Express and JOSA A in 2019.

After finishing his thesis in late 2019, Eric accepted a position at Synopsys Inc. as a Senior R&D Engineer, primarily developing algorithms for the optical design software CODE V. In his personal life, Eric plans to get married in the summer of 2020.


Eric, his fiance Sarah, and mother Kimberlee at
Harry Potter World in Orlando, FL 2019

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