In Memoriam: Jack D. Gaskill

SPIE Fellow and Past President Jack Gaskill, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona's (UA) Wyant College of Optical Sciences (OSC) passed away 24 January at his home in Tucson. He was 86.

Born in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1935, Gaskill grew up on a small farm where his family raised chickens, rabbits, horses, cows, and sheep. His father was head of sugar beet production research at USDA's Crops Research Laboratory, located near the campus of Colorado A&M University (now, Colorado State). Gaskill later attended Colorado A & M on a wrestling scholarship where he studied electrical engineering.

In 1963, after a stint in the Air Force, Gaskill entered Stanford University to study transistor circuit design, but found that his assistantship had been moved from the electronics lab to a newly built laser lab. In a 2021 "Reflections" column from OSC, Gaskill notes that he was disappointed by the change at first, but later considered this incident to be his "lucky fall into optics" as he began to "see the light."

Joseph W. Goodman, Gaskill's research adviser at the time, remembered Jack as a serious scientist and engineer. "I recall Jack spending many nights in the Stanford foothills area of the Santa Cruz Mountains doing interference measurements in the presence of atmospheric turbulence," says Goodman in the article. "We were investigating how well one could measure fringes produced by two coherent point sources, and how one could deduce atmospheric turbulence parameters from such measurements. This was pretty difficult stuff, and Jack performed extremely well in both the experimental work and the theory that accompanied it."

Gaskill joined UA in 1968 as an assistant professor of optical sciences. His career included publishing Linear Systems, Fourier Transforms, and Optics in 1978 and being involved in administrative activities, including serving as associate director for Academic Affairs. He was also instrumental in establishing the Industrial Affiliates program at OSC.

Throughout his career, Gaskill recognized the importance of being involved with professional societies for himself and for his students. He became a Fellow of SPIE in 1977 and served as editor of the SPIE journal Optical Engineering from 1985 to 1990. He was awarded the SPIE President's Award in 1990, and was elected President of SPIE in 1995, an experience he describes as "one of his best."

He stated in a 2016 OSC interview: "As President of SPIE, I was given opportunities to visit other universities and industrial companies that were involved in optics. I traveled throughout Europe and Asia, places I might not have visited otherwise. I also was introduced to some incredibly accomplished individuals that I might not have met otherwise."

Jack Gaskill (right) and his wife Sandra at an Alumni of the Year event at the University of Arizona with then SPIE CEO Eugene Arthurs in 2013.

In 1999, Jack and his wife Sandra commemorated his retirement from OSC by contributing a generous gift for undergraduate student scholarships in optical sciences. Many alumni followed his example, making contributions that endowed the Jack D. Gaskill Undergraduate Scholarship. In 2015, colleagues, friends, and alumni further honored Jack for his contributions as a professor, adviser, mentor, and administrator by establishing the Jack D. Gaskill Graduate Student (FoTO) Scholarship

Gaskill was widely known for his poetry/limerick-writing skills and his great sense of humor — and for his walk-on roll in the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, which was filmed on the UA campus.

As a young ground school instructor teaching flight techniques at Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma, Gaskill had been advised that using humor in the classroom was an effective way to put students more at ease and activate learning — so he made a habit of telling a joke at the start of each class — a pattern he followed throughout his career.

An optics-advocate to the end, his Arizona license plate proudly read "4YAY."

A Celebration of Life ceremony for Jack Gaskill will be held at UA. For more details, read the memorial from OSC.