James Kafka
Organisation: Spectra-Physics Role: CTO Based in: Milpitas, California, USA
James Kafka is no stranger to lists of notable achievers. He received the Thermo Electron Corporate Award for Technical Innovation in 2002 and the first Newport Corporation Strategic Patent Award in 2007 for his patent of the first diode-pumped double-clad fibre laser. Kafka has dozens of United States
patents, contributed to scores of refereed journals and made presentations at probably more CLEO, Optica meetings, SPIE conferences and major universities than he would care to remember. This former Optica board member continues to innovate – one
Thomas Kalkbrenner
Organisation: Carl Zeiss Microscopy Role: Team lead & lead architect, Special 3D Product Line
Thomas Kalkbrenner is understandably a busy man. Since being nominated for The Photonics100, he and Carl Zeiss colleagues Jörg Siebenmorgen and Ralf Wolleschensky were awarded the €250,000 Deutscher Zukunftspreis (German Future Prize) in Berlin on October 26. The prize was awarded for the team’s
development of a high-resolution fluorescence microscope that can 3D image living cells without damaging or affecting them. Kalkbrenner, who believes that RNA screening and spatialomics are the next
Based in: Jena, Germany Education: PhD in Physics
big thing in his area of photonics research, suggests that the demands of managing data will be significant. ‘Biomedical 3D imaging creates huge
datasets, at the same time many imaging modalities (e.g. superresolution imaging) require processing of the raw data – ideally in real time,’ he said. You can find Kalkbrenner online at linkedin. com/in/thomas-kalkbrenner-7a844b2/ or
researchgate.net/profile/Thomas- Kalkbrenner. He hopes to attend FOM (Focus on Microscopy) and ELMI (European Light Microscopy Initiative) in 2023.
Simonas Kicas
Organisation: Optoman Role: Co-founder and CTO
Simonas Kičas believes Optoman, a manufacturer of custom ion-beam sputtering (IBS) coated laser optics founded in 2017, will face broadly similar challenges to the rest of the world in 2023 – supply chain issues, the possibility of recession and economic uncertainty. ‘Regarding the research challenges, it might be a need for optical superior components for MPC (multi-pass cell) applications, which seems to be a hot research topic,’ he said. He takes an incremental view of research
development and does not expect to see “one big thing” in thin film coating research
Based in: Vilnius, Lithuania Education: PhD in Material Engineering
over the next 12 months. Instead, he foresees ‘many small steps, improvements of existing technologies which will lead to better performance of optical components’. 'Each time you start a new topic of
research you get some results, you know more, but there is also a flow of unanswered questions, failed experiments, unexplainable results. It took me some time to see the failures as an opportunity to learn, to find a motivation and curiosity in them…that despite all the issues and all the things that went wrong a huge progress was made. Kičas plans to attend the OCLA symposium, Photonics West and Laser World of Photonics.
Education: PhD in Optics, University of Rochester
of his most recent patents has been a low- repetition rate infrared tunable femtosecond laser source. It’s a cavity-dumped low repetition rate infrared tunable femtosecond laser source configured to produce pulses of 200 femtoseconds or less with a peak power of four megawatts or more for use in a variety of applications including multi- photon microscopy. The Spectra-Physics product portfolio, part of MKS Instruments, consists of a broad spectrum of lasers for precision industrial and scientific research applications and James remains the division’s distinguished CTO.
36 Photonics100 2023
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