Kidger Optics Associates: Michael Kidger Memorial Scholarship: Awardees: Winner 2011

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Michael Kidger Memorial Scholarship:
2011 AWARDEE - KYLE FUERSCHBACH

Tina Kidger and Kyle Fuerschbach
Kidger Scholarship Award Presentation
SPIE Optical Systems Design Conference
Marseille, FR, September 5, 2011

Award Year 2011

Kyle Fuerschbach was the 2011 awardee of the Michael Kidger Memorial Scholarship. At the time of the award, Kyle was a 3rd year PhD student at the Institute of Optics, The University of Rochester under the tutelage of Prof. Jannick Rolland, Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering. Kyle’s planned thesis topic is: “A New Class of Optical Design Forms based on Non-Symmetric and Freeform Surfaces.” Kyle has a B.S. in Optical Engineering from the University of Arizona with a 4.0 GPA where he also completed a minor in mathematics.

The 2011 award was presented to Kyle at SPIE's Optical Systems Design conference on 5 September 2011 held at the World Trade Center, Hotel Mercure, Marseille, France.

One of Kyle's favorite geometrical problems as an undergraduate at the University of Arizona was to design and raytrace a collapsible, pirate telescope. Successfully working through that first order design problem provided a realization that optics was the right career path for Kyle. He increased his skill set with an extended part time internship at Sandia National Laboratories where he gained practical experience dealing with several optical payloads and became motivated to pursue graduate education at The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester.

As well as being the 2008 undergraduate valedictorian at The Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona, Kyle has won a number of awards including the 2010 Optical Research Associates student optical design competition, a 2006 Jack D. Gaskill Scholarship, a 2006 SPIE Scholarship and now the 2011 Michael Kidger Memorial Scholarship.

Kyle Fuerschbach

Update 2020

From 2011 to 2014, Kyle continued his doctoral studies and received his Ph.D. in 2014 from the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. In his graduate work, he examined freeform optical surfaces for their use in optical system design and investigated the ability to fabricate and measure this new surface type. He also implemented a methodology to analytically describe the aberration field behavior of freeform optical surfaces, particularly those related to phi-polynomial surfaces, using Nodal Aberration Theory. Finally, he designed and built an all reflective pathfinder optical system that employs three tilted, freeform, Zernike polynomial optical surfaces for use in the long wave infrared.

Since graduating, Kyle has worked at Sandia National Laboratories in the Optical Sensors Engineering group as a Principal Member of the Technical Staff. In his current role, Kyle is focused on the realization of optical payloads for remote sensing applications with an emphasis on developing systems that are compact and manufacturable.

In 2019, Kyle received the 2019 Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award from the Optical Society. He was recognized for his work in freeform surfaces for optical system design.