I am incredibly excited to start my year as Optica president, a role I must admit I have been hoping for several decades to fill. This year, I plan to travel on behalf of the society, deliver technical talks, meet old friends and visit as many student chapters as possible.
For those of you who are new friends, please permit me to introduce myself. I earned my degrees in optics from the University of Rochester, USA, and I have spent the last 40 years designing lasers at Spectra-Physics. I am now the first Emeritus Fellow of our parent company, MKS, which means I get to concentrate on the most interesting parts of the job and spend more time on Optica projects. Alongside my work and research interests, I still play volleyball and Renaissance and Baroque music, and I collect signatures from optics pioneers, including Anthony Siegman, Joseph Goodman, Ursula Keller, Orazio Svelto, Rudolf Kingslake, Emil Wolf, Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes.
I am also fascinated by interfaces—a perspective that will inform my approach as Optica president. I have spent my career working at the border between industry and academia, as well as between engineering and marketing. From this vantage point, I have been a keen observer of how we communicate (or don’t) across these boundaries, and I’ve noted all the opportunities missed because of a lack of understanding or collaboration.
I feel so strongly about the issue of communication that I tackled it at the Siegman International School on Lasers in 2020 and plan to revisit the topic in a future President’s Message. The bottom line is this: To advance groundbreaking research and the development of new optics and photonics technologies, it is crucial that we reach across these divides in the interest of our common goals.
This past year, I was impressed and encouraged by the society’s programming for industry, which can help to foster new partnerships and encourage growth in different parts of our community. As a relative outsider at the Optica Freeform Optics Industry Summit in Rochester last April, I helped identify both grand challenges and gaps in the field. In October, I had the honor of moderating a panel at the Global Photonics Economic Forum in Málaga, Spain, on how research and technology organizations take research and increase the technology readiness level (the measurement system used to assess the maturity of a technology) on the way to generating products.
This is a task I have wrestled with at my day job, and I am sure that finding new and better ways to move from a proof of concept in the lab to a real-world application is a challenge we can all embrace and work together to achieve.
As we begin 2025 and I start my Optica presidency, I hope to help build connections among different areas of the society and find opportunities to unite the broader optics and photonics community. I look forward to communicating with you through these messages in each issue of OPN and meeting many of you around the world this year.
—Jim Kafka,
Optica President