Applied optics and instrumentation

Felix Weinberg

Felix Jiri Weinberg (1928–2012) was a British combustion physicist who spent his career at Imperial College London, pioneering optical flame diagnostics, electric-field combustion control, and the heat-recirculating burner.

Ferdinand Kurlbaum

Ferdinand Kurlbaum (1857–1927) was a German experimental physicist at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt whose blackbody radiation measurements, including work with Heinrich Rubens, gave Planck the experimental foundation for quantum theory in 1900.

Frits Zernike

Frits Zernike (1888–1966) was a Dutch physicist at the University of Groningen who won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physics for the phase contrast microscope.

George Michael Morris

G. Michael Morris is an American optical engineer who spent 19 years as Professor of Optics at Rochester and founded three photonics companies, including RPC Photonics.

Gustaf Dalén

Nils Gustaf Dalén was a Swedish engineer and inventor who won the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physics for automatic valves for lighthouses and led the gas company AGA.

Hans Busch

Hans Busch (1884–1973) was a German physicist who founded electron optics, showing in 1927 that a magnetic coil acts on electrons as a lens, enabling the electron microscope.

Harald Rose

Harald Rose (1935–2026) was a German theoretical physicist and electron optician whose hexapole corrector, proposed in 1990, enabled atomic-resolution electron microscopy and won him the 2020 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience.

Heinrich Hertz

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was a German physicist who first generated and detected electromagnetic waves in 1887, proving Maxwell's theory; the unit hertz is named for him.

Heinrich Rubens

Heinrich Rubens (1865–1922) was a German experimental physicist who pioneered the far-infrared region, whose 1900 black-body measurements helped drive Planck's quantum radiation law, and who invented the flame tube that makes standing sound waves visible.

Henri Abraham

Henri Abraham (Henri Azariah Abraham, 1868–1943) was a French experimental physicist who directed the ENS physics laboratory, designed the T.M. triode tube, and developed the multivibrator.

Henry Siedentopf

Henry Friedrich Wilhelm Siedentopf (1872–1940) was a German physicist at Carl Zeiss in Jena who co-invented the slit ultramicroscope with Richard Zsigmondy in 1903, making sub-wavelength colloidal particles visible.

Herbert E. Ives

Herbert E. Ives, also known as Herbert Eugene Ives, was an American physicist who headed television and facsimile research at Bell Labs and ran the 1938 Ives–Stilwell experiment.

Howard R. Hart Jr.

Howard R. Hart Jr. (1929–2025) was an American physicist-engineer who spent his entire career at the GE Research Laboratory in New York, working on superconductivity, Apollo experiments, and MRI.

Hratch G. Semerjian

Hratch G. Semerjian is an American measurement scientist and engineering executive who spent 30 years at NIST, serving as Acting Director and pioneering combustion and laser diagnostics research.

Il´ja M. Frank

Il´ja M. Frank, also known as Il´ja Mikhailovich Frank, was a Soviet physicist who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the Cherenkov effect.

Oct 22, 2026

Ivan Pulyui

Ivan Pulyui (Іван Пулюй) was a Ukrainian physicist and electrical engineer who built early X-ray-emitting tubes, co-translated the first complete Ukrainian Bible in 1903, and served as rector of the German Polytechnic in Prague.

James Brown Fisk

James Brown Fisk (1910–1981) was an American physicist who helped develop the microwave magnetron for wartime radar and served as president of Bell Laboratories from 1959 to 1973.

James C. Wyant

James C. Wyant (1943–2023) was an American optical scientist who pioneered phase-shifting interferometry, founded WYKO and 4D Technology, and led the University of Arizona's optics college.

Janusz S. Wilczynski

Janusz S. Wilczynski is a physicist and optical engineer known for designing optics for semiconductor manufacturing during a career at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Jon R. Pratt

Jon R. Pratt is an American mechanical engineer who leads the Quantum Measurement Division at NIST and managed the measurement that redefined the kilogram in 2019.

Joseph A. Shaw

Joseph A. Shaw is an American optical remote sensing scientist who won the 1998 PECASE award and directs the Optical Technology Center at Montana State University.

K. Uno Ingard

K. Uno Ingard, born Karl Uno Ingard (1921–2014), was a Swedish-born physicist and acoustician who spent his career at MIT working in acoustics and plasma physics.

Kenneth Mees

Charles Edward Kenneth Mees (1882–1960) was a British-born photographic scientist who founded and directed the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, New York, from 1912 until his retirement in 1955.

Ladislaus Laszlo Marton

Ladislaus Laszlo Marton (1901–1979) was a Hungarian-born physicist who built one of the first electron microscopes in Brussels and recorded the first biological electron microscope images in 1934.

Ladislaus Marton

Ladislaus Marton (1901–1979 or 1980) was a Hungarian-born physicist who took the first electron micrographs of biological material and warned in 1934 that electron beams destroy cells.

Martin Heimbeck

Martin Heimbeck is a German-born American research physicist leading advanced sensing work at the Army Aviation & Missile Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and a 2017 PECASE recipient.

Martin Schadt

Martin Schadt, born 1938 in Liestal, Switzerland, is a Swiss physicist who co-invented the twisted nematic liquid-crystal effect at Roche in 1970, the basis of LCDs.

Marvin Chodorow

Marvin Chodorow (1913–2005) was an American applied physicist at Stanford University whose klystron research raised microwave power from watts to megawatts, powering the SLAC accelerator.

Maurice Françon

Maurice Françon (1913–1996) was a French engineer-physicist who spent his career at the Institut d'Optique in Paris, working on phase contrast, polarization interferometry, coherence, and holography, and winning the Optical Society's C.E.K. Mees Medal in 1981.