Katherine Creath: The 2025 SPIE Chandra S. Vikram Award in Optical Metrology

Katherine Creath, a consultant at Optineering, is one of the most influential people in the field of optical testing of the past 40 years. Highly active as a researcher, consultant, scientist, author, mentor, trainer, and conference organizer, she utilizes and propagates optical testing, optical metrology, and optical design for scientific and industrial applications ranging from the microscopic to the telescopic. She has also been held in high regard from the earliest days of her career: “I have known Kathy Creath since she became a graduate student at the University of Arizona,” wrote the late, legendary optics leader James C. Wyant. “She approached me about becoming one of my students and I checked around to find out more about her, and Rudolf Kingslake told me she was one of the best students he ever had in his lens-design course at Rochester, so I accepted her.” Once Creath completed her doctorate, Wyant hired her at WYKO, where she helped develop the company’s line of phase-shifting interferometers. Creath went on to pioneer many novel methods in optical testing, including phase-measuring interferometry, two-wavelength interferometry along with low-light-level metrology, and quantitative phase measurement of living biological cellular systems.

As a professor, Creath has mentored many young scientists, supervising MS and PhD students in optical testing and metrology who are now contributing to the field at a high level. She is known for her expertise and flexibility as a consultant, helping clients get their products to market. As an optics consultant for the LIGO and Advanced LIGO projects, she helped specify very precise complex optical surfaces that developed optical testing procedures to verify the LIGO core optics.

Creath, an SPIE Fellow since 1998, sat on the Society’s Board of Directors from 1994-1996 and has been an active contributor to more than 30 SPIE conferences since 1986. Those conference roles include serving as chair of SPIE Optics + Photonics multiple times, the program-track chair for Optical Engineering + Applications, and many conference program committees. In addition, she has served on the Society’s Awards, Fellows, Publications, Symposium, Nominating and Leadership Development, and Education Committees.

“The impact of Dr. Creath’s work helped create numerous commercial products that made WYKO one of the world’s leading suppliers of interferometers for optical testing,” says Montana State University Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Optical Technology Center Director Joseph Shaw. “Her impact also runs throughout the highly successful products that are being sold by 4D Technology, making clever use of polarization-sensitive cameras to simultaneously generate the four different phase measurements for a phase-shifting interferometry measurement, thereby completely revolutionizing the field of optical interferometry by making it possible to obtain interferometric measurements without completely static surfaces. This was incredibly useful for achieving practical tests of larger and more complex telescopes. Overall, she has pioneered the development of academic phase-based interferometric measurement methods, then led the implementation of successful commercial products with those and related methods. In doing this, she has helped enable several of the most exciting space and solar physics missions in recent years, as well as opening the door to a huge range of phase-imaging applications to reveal secrets of cellular processes. From the very large to the very small, Kathy Creath has made fundamental contributions to optical metrology.”

Meet the other 2025 SPIE Society Award recipients.

Read more about Katherine Creath and the SPIE Chandra S. Vikram Award in Optical Metrology.