Jannick P. Rolland: The 2025 SPIE A. E. Conrady Award in Optical Engineering

Jannick Rolland is the Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering at the University of Rochester’s Institute of Optics. Additional university roles include a professorship in the Center for Visual Science, and the founding directorship of the Center for Freeform Optics, an industry/university cooperative research center in partnership with the National Science Foundation and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She is also the director of Rochester’s R.E. Hopkins Center for Optical Design and Engineering. Over her career, Rolland has developed numerous novel optical-engineering solutions across a wide range of fields. These include designing the optics for SPOT4, an Earth-monitoring satellite in orbit from 2008-2013, and developing mathematics to describe the “lumpy background” noise that plagues medical images, which gave rise to a widely adopted method to assess image quality in diagnostic instruments. In the last ten years, she has addressed a key challenge in AR/VR with a novel type of optical component, the metaform, and has inspired the broad adoption of freeform optics in imaging systems. Freeform systems are of increasing importance in AR/VR systems, spaceborne systems, and man-portable systems. Rolland is also CTO and co-founder of LighTopTech, a biotech company that commercializes sub-cellular resolution Gabor-domain optical coherence 3D microscopy, a technology which she invented.

An SPIE Fellow, Rolland was featured in the 2009 SPIE Women in Optics publication. She currently contributes to the conference program committees for SPIE’s BiOS, AR|VR|MR, and Optical Systems Design symposia, among others. She’s been presenting her research at SPIE conferences regularly since 1991 and was an associate editor of the SPIE journal Optical Engineering from 1999-2004.

“I first met Jannick through her husband, Kevin Thompson, who was my manager at Optical Research Associates,” says Synopsys scientist William Cassarly. “That provided me with the opportunity to work with Jannick and her students. Those meetings were often the highlight of my week, and for that I will be forever indebted to Jannick. In addition, some of those interactions were the basis for software features that are now the standards for illumination software. One example is the LightTools® and LucidShape® Freeform Design Feature, which is ‘the’ commercially available illumination design tool for Freeform optics. The algorithm used, was strongly influenced by the research and contributions from two of Jannick’s students, Florian Fournier and Cristina Canavesi. Without those interactions, this design feature would probably not exist, and freeform illumination design would not be the same. Jannick is able to see connections between disparate communities, and her consummate leadership brings together contributors from those communities to make new things happen. Her technical and leadership contributions to the field are phenomenal; there are many people, like myself, who consider themselves fortunate to have worked with Jannick. Through her efforts and ability to bring together the right people and organizations, we’ve been able to change illumination tolerancing from an art to a science.”

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Read more about Jannick P. Rolland and the SPIE A. E. Conrady Award in Optical Engineering.