John R. Rogers: The 2020 SPIE Rudolf and Hilda Kingslake Award in Optical Design

With more than 35 years contributing to the optics industry, SPIE Fellow John R. Rogers has worked with Leica, Kern, Optical Research Associates, and Synopsys as well as participating extensively in the academic optics community and with professional optics societies. His technical accomplishments include contributions to the theory of non-rotationally symmetric systems, optical tolerancing, and imaging systems. Many of his publications emphasize the important aspect of tolerancing in design, fabrication, and testing of optical systems, an approach which has proved of significant value to lens designers and optical fabricators across the globe.

Considered one of the foremost experts in the field of optical design, Rogers has acted as chair for the SPIE International Optical Design Conference, presenting his research there and at several other field-relevant SPIE conferences since 1999. Rogers has also impacted many next-generation optics students through his teaching appointments at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, and the Wyant College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona.

"I am especially fond of John for his unique ability to gain insight into a design and for his ability to solve some of the hardest challenges," says Jannick Rolland, Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering at the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics. "Some of his key contributions include the development of algorithms for the reduction of tolerance sensitivity and athermalization; these are particularly technologically advanced and John ‘nailed it,' so to speak. I worked directly with him on DARPA's Manufacturable Gradient Index Optics (M-GRIN) at DARPA ten years ago: he was the designer on our team. His insight not only into design, but also into the metrology of the samples that we were leading with my team, were invaluable. I very much enjoyed having this exceptional thinker and rigorous scientist working side by side with us."

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