Publication Highlights

I spent four years as the Optical Design and Analysis lead for the Wide Field Instrument on the Roman Space Telescope, and this paper in JATIS is the culmination of that work. We verified WFI's performance over two vacuum chamber tests, examining image quality, confocality, stray light tightness, calibration effectiveness, and optomechanical alignment. All of these tests showed that WFI was ready to transform the future of astrophysics as part of Roman. 

This is a unique paper in my publication history as it summarizes the teaching activities I've done as part of the University of Arizona senior design projects. In these projects, we sponsor an idea, and set requirements for teams of 5-7 students to accomplish over an academic year. I helped teach this class during my PhD, as well as experiencing it myself as an undergraduate. This paper gives several example projects across the past years to showcase what went well and what can be improved, as well as summarizing general roadblocks students consistently experience for other mentors to be aware of.

The eight science filters on the Wide Field Instrument enable scientists to choose with wavelengths of light they want to observe with. Each of them needed to enable high-quality imaging, but also not affect the focus of the observatory much as each was rotated into the active position. This paper summarize my work as the filter responsible engineer to measure the filter's performance and ensure they would meet requirements. It also gives a broad mission summary of WFI's objectives. 

The science needs for the Roman Space Telescope require the most finely calibrated detector to ever fly! The Wide Field Instrument flies with a on-board calibrator that works with two different optics: a flat-fielding lambertian (uniformly scattering in all directions) diffuser, and a special engineered diffuser that is part of the filter assemblies. This special little diffuser (modeled with my hand in the picture on the left) helps to correct a special type of detector non-uniformity that could affect Roman's ability to do its science if left uncorrected.

Predicting the design choices of an observatory that doesn't exist yet that will affect stability on a level never before achieved is not a trival task! We wrote a software package called ULTRAsim (ULTRA standing for the Ultrastable Large Telescopes Research and Analysis program) to do this very sort of analysis. It can simulate the operation of sensors and actuators on the overall telescope stability, and simulate how well a controller can stabilize the telescope given those simulated sensed inputs. 

The next NASA flagship mission after Roman, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, has exceedingly tight requirements on the stability of the telescope assembly. By exceedingly tight, I mean fractions of an atom's radius, single picometers in some cases! We made actuators and capacitor based sensors to control the position of a piece of highly stable glass to the picometer scale. This paper summarizes the actuator testing work, as well as two different tests of the capacitive sensors, one with simple piezos, and the other with our patented picometer acutators. 

The Roman Space Telescope is the next NASA flagship mission after JWST, and we at BAE Systems (still Ball Aerospace when this paper was written) built the Wide Field Instrument, the primary science instrument on the telescope. My role as the Optical Design and Analysis lead was to ensure that the 8 science filters would meet requirements when the instrument was in space, requiring some detailed simulations predicting on-orbit performance based on measured data. 

This Optics Letters paper (alongside an SPIE proceedings paper) represent the culmination of my dissertation work to design an all-reflective multimodal multiphoton microscope. The all-reflective nature of the microscope would enable multiple imaging modes easily, and the combination of this with some clever laser design work by my friend Dr. Yukin Qin created a powerful instrument.

Continuing on the pancreatic cancer thread of my dissertation work, we examined the tissue of both healthy mice and mice with pancreatic cancer. We compare the ability of traditional tissue staining processes to four nonlinear imaging methods to see which one has the advantage in information richness and speed of acquisition. No surprises here, multiphoton microscopy wins handily. This paper also has some great, high resolution multiphoton images.

This paper was the fastest I've ever gone from starting a project to writing the paper. My professor Dr. Khanh Kieu is a man full of ideas, and we looked at a variety of different things under the microscope. When we started putting gems and minerals beneath the objective, the microscope lit up with beautiful images in three dimensions, images the world had never seen before from this unique application of the microscope. This paper has valuable scientific details in it, but part of why it is so memorable to me are the beautiful images created. There's an even larger collection of images from this paper still on my professor's website.

Pancreactic cancer is not even in the ten most common cancers, yet it has a very high mortality rate (alternating between the 3rd and 5th most deadly cancer depending on the study and gender of patients). The main way to survive this cancer is to have it fully removed during surgery. However, the odds surgeons remove all of it successfully are poor due to the slow imaging methods used in current practice. In this paper, we pair special bubbles that have little prongs that chemically attach to only cancer cells with a special type of microscope called a multiphoton microscope to show that the odds of finding all the cancer can be improved!