Optics Pioneer Eustace L. Dereniak to Lead SPIE in 2012
Dereniak is an optical sciences and engineering professor at the UA. SPIE is the world's largest professional organization dedicated to optics and photonics.

Jennifer Fitzenberger
Dec. 13, 2011


For nearly five decades, Eustace L. Dereniak has explored the frontiers of optics and engineering to help create 21st century breakthroughs in medicine, military hardware, astronomy and many other fields.

Dereniak will become president of SPIE, the world's largest professional organization dedicated to optics and photonics, in January. He has been a professor in the University of Arizona's College of Optical Sciences since 1979 and is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering.

"The 21st century will be the Photon Century, just as the 20th century was the Century of the Electron," Dereniak said. "The photon is three orders of magnitude faster than the electron, and by harnessing it we are working at the speed of light."

In his labs at the UA, Dereniak's team advances the techniques for capturing information at long distances to identify an object from the spectra of light on its surface. The newest techniques in that field are known as snapshot spectroscopy. The technology can gather an instant "snapshot" of all the objects in a field of view, whether the cornea of an eye or a military battlefield, rather than taking time to focus on objects at particular points.

"Our next goal is to add the third dimension; determine the distance passively," Dereniak said. "When we have a target, we would like to be able to take a picture and know the object's spectrum and the polarity, and in addition know its distance from us. That would be something to celebrate."

Such spectroscopy could analyze the components, say, of a distant firecracker while measuring the full field of view during its blast.

In another application, a doctor looking at blood cells using fluorescence spectroscopy would want to take a single image over the entire field of view at one time. "If you selected one blood cell and missed another, it may be too late. You want to analyze the full field of view, continuously," Dereniak said.

Dereniak also studies ways to use photonics to uncover information about objects using the polarity of photons on their surface. Photons can assume one of four kinds of polarity, and detecting their polarization can reveal much about the object's characteristics, which is known as polarization spectroscopy.

In military applications, that technique lets a device analyze a weapon quickly, at long distance, when observing the full field of vision is crucial. "If somebody is shooting an anti-tank missile at you, and your instrument is looking in the wrong place, it would not detect it. You need full field coverage," Dereniak said. "You need to know quickly if what you see is really an ATM flash, or a campfire or cigarette in the distance."

Photonics can improve global agricultural efficiency and production in order to support a growing world population, which has just hit 7 billion people. "Although the ratio of population to available sustainable resources will continue to grow, new technologies could one day be used to manage energy consumption and increase food and clean fresh water supplies," said Dereniak.

Dereniak began his study of optics and engineering at the Michigan Technological University, and continued to his master's in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his doctorate in optical sciences at the University of Arizona.

During the Cold War era, he worked at the Willow Run Laboratories of the Michigan Institute of Science and Technology on ways to use infrared technology to detect the electro-magnetic signatures of vehicles re-entering our atmosphere from space.

Dereniak worked at Rockwell International in Anaheim, Calif., on optical systems including cryogenically cooled space-borne telescopes from 1965-72. He focused on analog electronics that use super-cooling cryogens like liquid helium, liquid neon or liquid nitrogen. He worked next at Ball Brothers Research Corporation, in Boulder, Colo., helping build instruments for weather satellites, again using infrared systems in space.

As a professor at the UA, he developed infrared systems and detectors, and later studied geometrical optics and the silicon-based infrared detectors that play a key role in cryogenic (super-cooled) telescopes. In outer space, such telescopes are kept very cold, as low as 10 degrees Kelvin, just a few degrees above absolute zero, in order to deliver high-resolution images. (Absolute zero is zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or the total absence of heat. It is also 273 degrees below zero Celsius, or 460 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.)

In the Star Wars era of the 1980s, Dereniak helped develop infrared systems to monitor weapons using spectrometry. He worked with the military on intelligence-gathering aircraft at the research-centered Hanscom Air Force Base and on optics applications like camouflage systems at the U.S. Army's Fort Belvoir, in Virginia.

After Desert Storm (the Gulf War), Dereniak worked in the 1990s on ways to employ snapshot image spectrometers to detect missiles launched to attack tanks.

Dereniak has been author or coauthor of five books and nearly 100 articles in research journals on topics ranging from infrared detection to geometrical optics. He has supervised 28 doctoral students and 34 students at the master's level.

In 2010, the Optical Society gave him its Esther Hoffman Beller Medal for outstanding contributions to science and engineering education. He recently received the U.S. Army Commander's Award for outstanding contributions to the Department of Physics at West Point, and in 2006 received the College of Optical Science's Award of Distinction for Undergraduate Teaching.

He enjoys hunting deer and elk from his cabin near Winslow, Ariz., and often summers at a family farm in Standish, Mich., that produces soybeans, corn and wheat.

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Trish Pettijohns

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