Collaborator Contributions
Kevin Bundy
Dr. Bundy is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and a leader of several major instrumentation projects in astronomy. He serves as PI for the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey, TMT’s Wide-Field Optical Spectrograph, and Keck Observatories Fiber Optic Broadband Optical Spectrograph (FOBOS). His extensive involvement in future instrumentation motivates a strong desire to innovate new technologies.
Holger Schmidt
Dr. Schmidt is a Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the BSOE and the Kapany Endowed Chair of Optoelectronics. He is Associate Dean for Research and Director of the W.M. Keck Center for Nanoscale Optofluidics. With an active group working on optofluidics photonics and nanomagnet devices, Dr. Schmidt brings a deep understanding of photonics design, available resources, and strategic vision.
Sara Abrahamsson
Dr. Abrahamsson is an Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering in the BSOE. She invents and builds photonics-enabled microscopy platforms for bio-imaging. She invented a technique called aberration corrected multi-focus microscopy (MFM), which enables 3-dimensional imaging of living cells and showed that MFM can provide "super-resolution" beyond the classical limits of light microscopes. Her photonics devices have direct applications in adaptive optics.
Ben Abrams
Dr. Abrams is the Director of the UCSC Life Sciences Microscopy Center and an expert on advanced microscopy instrumentation and its application. His background is important because it allows him to identify instrumentation techniques which may have astrophotonics applications and to establish connections between Astrophotonics and Biophotonics, which PHI’s second focus area to be developed after launching the Astrophotonics Initiative.
Renate Kupke
Dr. Kupke is a Project Scientist at UC Observatories where she serves as Co-PI for the Keck LIGER instrument, Instrument Scientist for FOBOS, and provides optical design support for a number of other instrument projects, especially in the area of adaptive optics. Her AO knowledge and skill as an optical designer are crucial to realizing successful astrophotonics devices that can accept and process telescope light.
Claire Max
Dr. Max is the Director of UC Observatories and Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She was also founding director of the Center for Adaptive Optics (CfAO). Dr. Max brings a strategic perspective on UCO’s involvement in driving instrumentation technology. In the 1980s, this included the technology that makes it possible to build very large mirrors (enabling Keck Observatory). In the early 2000s, CfAO helped usher in the era of Adaptive Optics (AO) which has made diffraction-limited observations a regular observing mode on
every large telescope in the world. Astrophotonics represents a next step forward.
Xavier Prochaska
Dr. Prochaska is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and a leader within UC Observatories as the PI of the recently-deployed Keck Deployable Tertiary Mirror (K1DM3) and development of a comprehensive data analysis framework for astronomical instruments. He is also the founding director of UCSC’s Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative and is interested in the interface between artificial intelligence, big data, and
instrumentation design.
Andy Skemer
Dr. Skemer is Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and builds instruments for large telescopes designed to detect, image, and characterize extrasolar planets. His Keck SCALES instrument, for which he is PI, was recently awarded funding by the Heising-Simons Institute.
Ali Yanik
Dr. Yanik is an Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering in the BSOE. He builds nano-fluidic platforms for cancer diagnostics and is interested in nanoplasmonic and metamaterial devices for ultrasensitive spectroscopy of biomolecules and chemicals. He is an expert in nanolithography and the engineering of nanophotonic devices.
