The award comes from the U.S. Army Research Office and will support a collaboration anchored at UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics, known internationally as CREOL. The program is led by Guifang Li, a professor of optics and photonics at CREOL, and brings together researchers from CREOL and UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, along with partners at the University of Dayton and the University of California, Berkeley. Industry participants, including Meadowlark Optics Inc., Caelight Inc., Holodyne LLC and Texas Instruments, will work alongside the academic teams to explore how discoveries made during the program might move beyond the laboratory and into real-world technologies. The research is supported by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory through the Army Research Office under award number W911NF262A129.

Beyond its scientific ambitions, the award will also fund a new chapter for CREOL’s Townes Laser Institute, which Li will lead. Established at CREOL in 2007 and named for Nobel laureate and laser pioneer Charles Townes, the institute has long advanced laser technologies and their applications across fields ranging from manufacturing to medicine. Li plans to broaden its portfolio toward multidisciplinary projects that translate advances in lasers and photonics into practical solutions. “Townes Laser Institute will translate multidisciplinary scientific advances into solutions that aspire to benefit society as profoundly as the laser itself, to honor the legacy of Charles Townes,” Li says. The statement captures the scale of the ambition: a technology as transformative as the laser is a demanding benchmark for any research program.

The scientific heart of the program lies in a deceptively simple question. “We are interested in a very fundamental problem: How do you understand and control light when the environment between you and where you want the light to go is unknown, changing and inaccessible?” Li says. “That question appears in many different forms — from atmospheric propagation to looking through scattering tissue. If we can develop new ways to measure the optical environment and adapt to it in real time, the underlying science could have an impact across many fields.” The phrasing matters. In many practical scenarios, a sensor, beacon or other measurement device simply cannot be placed at the far end of the optical path, which means the system must learn about the distortions it faces using only the light that returns to it.

One family of techniques the team will pursue exploits an extremely small fraction of light that is naturally scattered backward as an optical wave propagates through a medium. This faint returning signal, ordinarily dismissed as noise, carries information about the conditions the wave encountered along its journey. By combining coherent optical measurements — which preserve information about the phase of light, not just its intensity — with advanced computational methods, the researchers will investigate whether these weak backscattered signals can be decoded to reveal how conditions vary along the optical path. In effect, the goal is to turn the stray light that every optical system sheds into a distributed sensor for the environment itself, allowing a system to characterize turbulence or scattering it cannot directly probe.

A second set of approaches attacks the problem from a different angle, using carefully engineered patterns of light paired with mathematical inverse methods. Inverse problems, a staple of computational imaging, involve working backward from measured data to infer the hidden causes that produced it. Here the challenge is especially thorny because two unknowns are entangled: the properties of the object being observed and the properties of the medium obscuring it. By illuminating a scene with structured light whose properties are deliberately designed, and by applying inverse algorithms to the resulting measurements, the team aims to simultaneously reconstruct both the unknown object and the distorting medium. The program will also harness artificial intelligence to analyze optical measurements, using machine learning to extract structure from data that would overwhelm conventional analysis and to build a better understanding of complex environments in real time.

Understanding a distortion, however, is only half the battle; undoing it is a separate and equally demanding challenge. To that end, the team will investigate a technique known as multi-plane light conversion. Conventional adaptive optics systems typically rely on a single corrective optical element, such as a deformable mirror, to undo the damage a wave has suffered. Multi-plane light conversion instead manipulates an optical wave across a series of controllable planes, allowing the correction to be distributed in depth. In principle, this architecture gives researchers far greater authority over both the amplitude and the phase of an optical field — the two properties that together fully describe a light wave — enabling a system to address distortions that single-plane methods cannot easily correct. For light traveling through the atmosphere, the technique could offer new ways to compensate for turbulence that changes from one instant to the next, while related principles could help recover images hidden behind biological tissue or sharpen the delivery of laser light through complex biological environments for medical applications.

Although the program is partly motivated by challenges involving directed-energy systems, where delivering a high-quality laser beam through kilometers of turbulent air is a central concern, the underlying science radiates outward into many domains. Imaging through biological tissue could benefit from the same mathematics of scattering and correction, opening doors in optical diagnostics and laser-based medicine. Remote sensing platforms could extract more information from the faint light they collect. Free-space optical communications, which beam data through the air between ground stations, aircraft and satellites, depend on precisely the kind of real-time environmental awareness and wavefront correction the program seeks to develop. The breadth of these applications explains why the U.S. Army Research Office has made a commitment of this scale: the same physics that scrambles a laser link also blurs a telescope image and fogs a medical scan.

The program’s structure reflects a deliberate fusion of disciplines that have traditionally lived apart. Coherent optical sensing, computational imaging, inverse methods, artificial intelligence, adaptive optics and programmable photonics will all be brought to bear on systems capable of characterizing and adapting to complex optical environments. This multidisciplinary approach also mirrors Li’s vision for the Townes Laser Institute as a place where researchers converge to build solutions for specific applications rather than pursuing narrow technical questions in isolation. The combination is increasingly the norm in modern photonics, where breakthroughs often emerge not from a single clever device but from the interplay of physics, algorithms and hardware designed to work together as a coherent system.

Training the next generation of optical scientists is woven into the program from the start. Students from UCF, the University of Dayton and UC Berkeley will gain hands-on experience across optical sensing, wavefront control, computational imaging, artificial intelligence and advanced photonic systems, learning to move fluidly between optical physics, computation and engineering. “An award of this scale gives us an unusual opportunity not only to pursue ambitious scientific questions, but also to train students across institutions and disciplines,” Li says. “The students will learn to think about optics as a complete system — combining physics, devices, computation and experiments. That workforce development is an important part of the program.” Industry partners will help carry discoveries toward commercialization, with Texas Instruments supplying prototypes of microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, before they become publicly available. “This award reflects UCF’s growing leadership in optics and photonics and demonstrates the impact that fundamental university research can have on technologies of national importance,” says CREOL Dean David Hagan. “Just as importantly, the program will educate the next generation of scientists and engineers needed to advance these technologies.” If the program succeeds, the light that reaches its destination through a turbulent world will do so because researchers finally learned to read the message the environment writes into every scattered photon — and to write a correction back.

Subject of Research: Controlling light propagation through turbulent and complex optical environments

Article Title: UCF awarded $19.2 million to study light in complex environments

Article References: UCF awarded $19.2 million to study light in complex environments. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: optics, photonics, UCF, CREOL, Townes Laser Institute, atmospheric turbulence, adaptive optics, wavefront control, computational imaging, artificial intelligence, free-space optical communications, Army Research Office

The vice presidency is a particularly consequential position within Optica’s governance structure. The society operates on a well-defined leadership ladder in which the vice president advances to president-elect and then to president, meaning that the person elected to the 2027 vice presidency is effectively being positioned to guide the organization’s strategic direction in the years that follow. Optica’s board is responsible for overseeing a portfolio that includes flagship scientific meetings, a family of peer-reviewed journals, industry partnerships, education and outreach programs, and policy engagement on behalf of researchers working across optics and photonics. With more than 400,000 members and constituents across the globe, the society’s decisions about which conferences to grow, which emerging subfields to champion, and how to support early-career scientists ripple widely through the community. The election of a new vice president therefore attracts close attention from researchers who want to see their priorities reflected at the top of the organization.

Delfyett’s election brings to the board one of the most technically accomplished figures in ultrafast optics and semiconductor laser research. His scientific reputation was established in part during his time at Bellcore, where he developed what has been described as the world’s fastest and most powerful mode-locked semiconductor laser diode. Mode-locked lasers are devices that produce trains of extremely short optical pulses, often lasting femtoseconds or picoseconds, by locking the phases of many longitudinal modes within the laser cavity. Achieving that feat in a semiconductor diode format, rather than in bulky solid-state systems, opened pathways toward compact, high-repetition-rate sources suitable for telecommunications, clocking, signal processing, and precision measurement. That line of research remains central to modern photonics, as mode-locked semiconductor lasers underpin technologies ranging from optical frequency combs to high-speed data transmission in fiber networks.

Since 1993, Delfyett has built his research program at CREOL, the University of Central Florida’s internationally regarded optics and photonics school, where he directs the Townes Laser Institute and holds the rank of University Distinguished Professor. His scholarly output is extensive: he has authored more than 850 publications and holds 45 U.S. patents, and he has translated laboratory advances into the commercial sphere as a co-founder of Raydiance, Inc., a company associated with ultrafast laser technology. His contributions have been recognized with election to the National Academy of Engineering, the American Physical Society’s Arthur L. Schawlow Prize, and the 2026 SPIE Harold E. Edgerton Award, an honor named for the pioneering electrical engineer and photographer whose stroboscopic imaging work became iconic. He is also a Fellow of APS, AAAS, Optica, the IEEE Photonics Society, SPIE, the National Society of Black Physicists, and the National Academy of Inventors, a collection of distinctions that reflects both scientific depth and breadth of service.

Beyond the laboratory, Delfyett has accumulated a long record of volunteer leadership within the scientific publishing and conference ecosystem. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics and as Chair of the CLEO Steering Committee, the body that helps guide one of the field’s largest annual conferences on lasers and electro-optics. His prior governance experience includes service on Optica’s own Board of Directors, membership on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Photonics Society, the chairmanship of the APS Division of Laser Science, and the presidency of the National Society of Black Physicists. That combination of editorial, conference, and society leadership is precisely the kind of institutional fluency that Optica’s membership tends to reward in board elections, and it positions him to step into the society’s presidential succession track with an intimate knowledge of how its programs operate.

Optica CEO Elizabeth Nolan welcomed the election, emphasizing both Delfyett’s scientific legacy and his service record. According to the society’s announcement, Nolan described him as someone who has spent his career pushing the boundaries of what ultrafast lasers can do, whose vision has helped shape modern photonics, and who is a strong leader, a brilliant scientist, and a dedicated volunteer. She added that the society is thrilled to welcome him to the Board of Directors, where his experience and expertise will help Optica meet the evolving needs of the optics and photonics community. The remarks signal that the board expects Delfyett’s perspective as both a researcher and an entrepreneur to inform its decisions at a time when photonics is expanding into new commercial territory, from silicon photonics in data centers to laser-based manufacturing and quantum technologies.

The two Directors at Large positions, covering the 2027 through 2029 term, went to figures who represent complementary corners of the discipline. Sterling Backus is an Advanced Project Scientist at Thorlabs, Inc., one of the world’s largest suppliers of photonics hardware and instrumentation, and an affiliate researcher at Colorado State University. His dual footing in industry and academia mirrors the reality of a field in which much of the instrumentation driving discovery is developed and manufactured by companies rather than built entirely in university shops. Within Optica, Backus has served on the Meetings Council, the body that shapes the society’s conference portfolio, and he is the program co-chair for the society’s Frontiers in Optics meeting for 2026 and 2027. He is an Optica Fellow and previously served as CLEO program chair in 2017 and general chair in 2019, experience that gives him detailed insight into how large-scale scientific meetings are planned, funded, and adapted to changing community needs.

Frédérique Vanholsbeeck brings a distinctly international and interdisciplinary dimension to the board. She is a professor of physics at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland in New Zealand, where she leads one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most active biophotonics groups. Biophotonics, the application of light-based technologies to biology and medicine, is among the fastest-growing areas of the field, encompassing optical coherence tomography, fluorescence microscopy, laser tweezers, and optical diagnostics for clinical use. Research groups in this area often sit at the interface of physics, engineering, and the life sciences, and leaders like Vanholsbeeck help ensure that the society’s programs serve researchers who do not fit neatly into traditional disciplinary boxes. Her governance experience includes the presidency of the Australian and New Zealand Optical Society, membership on a Marsden Fund panel, which distributes New Zealand’s major fundamental research grants, and multiple leadership roles in major international and regional conferences. She is also an Optica Fellow.

The geographic and sectoral balance of the new slate is notable. Optica has long emphasized its role as a global society, and the election of a director based in New Zealand alongside two United States-based leaders, one from a university research center and one from industry, reflects an attempt to keep the board representative of a membership that spans continents and career contexts. For researchers in Oceania and the broader Asia-Pacific region, Vanholsbeeck’s presence at the governance table offers a direct channel for the concerns of smaller national optical societies, which often face challenges distinct from those of large North American and European institutions, including limited access to major facilities and the logistical burden of distance from the field’s dominant conference hubs.

For the wider photonics community, the elections arrive at a moment when the discipline’s profile has never been higher. Optical technologies now carry the world’s internet traffic, guide autonomous vehicles, enable the precision manufacturing of semiconductors, and provide the measurement backbone for breakthroughs in timekeeping, navigation, and fundamental physics, including the laser interferometry behind gravitational-wave detection. The leaders chosen to steer Optica’s board will influence how the society invests in meetings, publications, and advocacy as these applications multiply. With Delfyett’s ultrafast laser expertise, Backus’s industry-grounded perspective on instrumentation and conferences, and Vanholsbeeck’s biophotonics and international leadership, the incoming directors bring a blend of technical depth and organizational experience that mirrors the field itself: fast-moving, commercially vital, and increasingly global.

Subject of Research: Election of new leaders to the board of the Optica optics and photonics society

Article Title: Peter J. Delfyett, Sterling Backus and Frédérique Vanholsbeeck will serve on Optica’s Board of Directors

Article References: Peter J. Delfyett, Sterling Backus and Frédérique Vanholsbeeck will serve on Optica’s Board of Directors. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Optica, Peter J. Delfyett, Sterling Backus, Frédérique Vanholsbeeck, ultrafast optics, semiconductor lasers, biophotonics, photonics, board of directors, CREOL, Thorlabs, University of Auckland