Prof. Wolfgang Fink

Associate Professor Dr. Wolfgang Fink is the inaugural Edward & Maria Keonjian Endowed Chair of Microelectronics with joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Systems & Industrial Engineering, Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, and Ophthalmology & Vision Science at the University of Arizona. He was a Visiting Associate in Physics at Caltech (2001-2016), and held concurrent appointments as Visiting Research Associate Professor of Ophthalmology and Neurological Surgery at the University of Southern California (2005-2014). Dr. Fink is the founder and director of the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory at Caltech and at the University of Arizona. He was a Senior Researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2001-2009). He obtained a B.S. and M.S. degree in Physics and Physical Chemistry from the University of Göttingen, Germany, and a Ph.D. "summa cum laude" in Theoretical Physics from the University of Tübingen, Germany in 1997. He is a Fellow AIMBE, PHM, SPIE, UA da Vinci and ACABI Fellow, and a Senior Member IEEE.

Dr. Fink, pursuing an inter-disciplinary systems engineering approach in human-machine interfaces, evolutionary optimization, and autonomous systems, has focused his research on biomimetic systems, biomedical sensor development, artificial vision, computer-optimized design, cognitive systems, and autonomous robotic space exploration.

Among numerous awards Dr. Fink was named co-recipient of the R&D Magazine’s R&D 100 Award and the R&D Magazine’s R&D 100 Editors’ Choice Award (the highest of the R&D 100 Awards) in 2009, both for the DOE-funded Artificial Retina Project. In 2009 he received the NASA Board Award for his pioneering work on a novel autonomous space exploration paradigm. Dr. Fink has currently over 257 publications and 21 patents in the areas of autonomous systems, biomedical devices, MEMS fabrication, data analysis, and multi-dimensional optimization.