Applied optics and instrumentation

Aimé Cotton

Aimé Auguste Cotton was a French physicist who discovered the Cotton effect in 1895, found the Cotton–Mouton effect with Henri Mouton, and led the Académie des sciences.

Alfred Lee Loomis

Alfred Lee Loomis (1887–1975) was an American physicist and investment banker who ran a private laboratory at Tuxedo Park, New York, headed wartime US radar research, and invented LORAN.

Alfred Perot

Alfred Perot (1863–1925) was a French physicist and astronomer who, with Charles Fabry, invented the Fabry–Pérot interferometer and helped determine the meter in terms of the wavelength of light.

Behrang Hamadani

Behrang Homayoun Hamadani is an American physicist who leads the Heat Transfer and Alternative Energy Systems Group at NIST and won the 2019 PECASE award.

Benjamin A. Mazin is an American experimental physicist at UC Santa Barbara who develops superconducting photon detectors, best known for microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs), including the MEC exoplanet camera at the Subaru Telescope.

Benjamin John McCall

Benjamin John McCall is an American chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign known for ultrasensitive spectroscopy of molecular ions, especially triatomic hydrogen (H₃⁺), linking laboratory measurements to interstellar astronomy.

Bodo von Borries

Bodo von Borries (1905–1956) was a German physicist and electrical engineer who, with Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll, developed the transmission electron microscope and directed the Siemens laboratory that made it a commercial product.

Brian O'Brien (optical physicist)

Brian O'Brien (1898–1992) was an American optical physicist, first permanent director of Rochester's Institute of Optics, known for wartime night vision, early fiber optics, and the Todd-AO widescreen film process.

Cecil Reginald Burch

Cecil Reginald Burch, known as Bill, was a British physicist and engineer who figured aspheric optical surfaces with extreme accuracy, producing the wide-aperture Burch reflecting microscopes.

Charles Fabry

Charles Fabry (1867–1945) was a French physicist from Marseille who co-invented the Fabry–Pérot interferometer and, with Henri Buisson, showed that ozone in the upper atmosphere blocks solar ultraviolet light.

Charles Glover Barkla

Charles Glover Barkla (1877–1944) was a British physicist who won the 1917 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the characteristic X-radiation of the elements, and held the chair of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

Charles S. Hastings

Charles Sheldon Hastings (1848–1932) was an American physicist and optical designer, professor at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School from 1884 to 1915, known for personally figuring achromatic telescope objectives and for spectroscopic studies of the Sun.

Christian Christiansen (Danish physicist)

Christian Christiansen (1843–1917) was a Danish physicist at the University of Copenhagen who discovered anomalous dispersion in 1870, invented the Christiansen filter, and taught Niels Bohr.

Christian Doppler

Christian Doppler was an Austrian physicist and mathematician who proposed in 1842 the Doppler effect, the shift in wave frequency from relative motion, now used in radar, astronomy, and medical ultrasound.

Daniel S. Hussey

Daniel S. Hussey is an American research physicist at NIST who leads neutron imaging research and demonstrated the world's first practical neutron microscope, earning a PECASE award.

David L. Webster

David L. Webster (1888–1976) was an American physicist who headed the Stanford physics department from 1920 to 1942 and was known for his work on X rays.

David Long (chemist)

David Long is a research chemist at NIST's Material Measurement Laboratory who builds laser-based instruments for gas spectroscopy, winning a 2019 Presidential Early Career Award.

Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor (Gábor Dénes, 1900 to 1979) was a Hungarian-born British electrical engineer and physicist who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing holography.

Donald C. Stockbarger

Donald C. Stockbarger (1895–1952) was an American physicist and educator at MIT who introduced the Bridgman–Stockbarger method of growing single crystals from the melt in the 1930s.

Donald L. Hammond

Donald Leroy Hammond (1927–2021) was an American physicist and quartz-crystal measurement specialist who joined Hewlett-Packard in 1959, led its first European research center, and retired in 1989 as Director of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.

Edward Ginzton

Edward Ginzton (1915–1998) was an American applied physicist who helped develop the klystron microwave tube, built the Stanford linear accelerators that grew into SLAC, and co-founded Varian Associates.

Edward V. Appleton

Edward V. Appleton, also known as Sir Edward Victor Appleton, was a British physicist who proved the ionosphere's existence and won the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Edwin H. Land

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) was an American physicist and inventor who founded Polaroid, invented instant photography and the synthetic sheet polarizer, and held 537 patents, second only to Edison.

Emmett Leith

Emmett Leith (1927–2005) was an American electrical engineer and physicist at the University of Michigan who, with Juris Upatnieks, developed practical holography in the early 1960s using laser light and an off-axis reference beam.

Eric L. Shirley

Eric L. Shirley is an American theoretical physicist at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, since 1994, who works on optical properties of solids and diffraction corrections in radiometry.

Ernst Abbe

Ernst Abbe was a German physicist who created the diffraction theory of microscope imaging, designed Zeiss microscopes scientifically from 1872, and gave the company to a foundation with pioneering labor rules.

Ernst Bessel Hagen

Ernst Bessel Hagen (1851–1923) was a German physicist who directed the technical department of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt and, with Heinrich Rubens, confirmed Maxwell's theory of light.

Ernst Gehrcke

Ernst Gehrcke (1878–1960) was a German experimental physicist and optics specialist at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin, co-inventor of the Lummer–Gehrcke interferometer plate and a leading opponent of Einstein's relativity from 1911 to 1924.

Ernst Pringsheim (physicist)

Ernst Pringsheim (1859–1917) was a German experimental physicist who, with Otto Lummer at the Reichsanstalt, measured blackbody radiation and showed Wien's law failed, setting the stage for Planck's quantum theory.