Profile

Ulrike Fuchs is Vice President for Strategy & Innovation at asphericon and oversees all R&D activities as well as strategic product development. After joining asphericon in 2010, Fuchs focused on linking the manufacturing of aspherics and metrology with questions in optical design. With her team, she also develops concepts to improve prediction of system performance during optical design and tolerancing. Most recently, Fuchs has emphasized transferring those ideas to freeform optics.

Fuchs holds a doctorate in physics from the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena. Her research was in the field of ultrashort pulse lasers, investigating their interactions with fused silica experimentally and by means of numerical simulations. In 2004, she was awarded the Faculty Prize for her research work. Throughout this time, she was a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation with a fully-funded scholarship, a highly prestigious and honorable distinction awarded to only a few hundred students throughout Germany each year.

In 2018, Fuchs was the inaugural winner of the Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award of Optica. She has authored and co-authored more than 70 publications and has registered six patent families. During the past 15 years, Fuchs has supervised more than 20 B.S. and M.S. theses in the field of optics. Also, she has been working as an Associate Editor for Optics Express since April 2018, and was elected a Fellow of Optica in 2020.

Beginning during her studies, Fuchs was involved as a representative in the faculty council and various appointment committees. Later, she began serving on program committees for various conferences, including optical design, optical manufacturing, metrology, and freeform optics. In 2019, she became the Chair of the SPIE Optical Design Conference and a member of the Paul F. Forman Team Engineering Excellence Award Selection Committee. In 2021, she was also appointed to the Faculty Advisory Board of the Physics Department of the FSU Jena.

Ulrike Fuchs lives with her husband and two children (ages 16 and 11) in Jena, Germany.

Election Statement

My first contact with Optica—or OSA as it was then known—was as a student almost 20 years ago. At that time, the diversity and high quality of the journals helped me a lot in my scientific work. In fact, my very first publication was in Optics Express in 2005, a fact of which I was very proud. Over the years, the conferences gained increasing importance for me as a place for scientific exchange, a source of inspiration and new ideas, and a place to meet and cultivate long-standing valuable academic friendships. With this experience, it was a natural step for me to get more involved with and for Optica.

Due to my own academic background, I can appreciate Optica’s great commitment to students and early-career professionals. I am committed to maintaining this tradition. The existing programs, be they on-site events or virtual workshops, offer a wide range of further education and networking opportunities. However, since I have been working in industry for 12 years, I would also like to increasingly address additional target groups. This concerns on one hand the group of postdocs and on the other the corporate members of Optica.

Photonics is a rapidly growing industry that lives and breathes the diversity of ideas and elegant, light-based solutions. It is therefore also important to allow scientists, who have worked in the field of academic research for a longer period, to arrive successfully in industry. This requires not only networking opportunities but also possibilities to develop skills that are specifically tailored to the requirements of industry. Examples of this are dealing with the different timescales in development projects or the ability to view solutions from the customer’s point of view.

This notion goes hand in hand with my intention to expand the offers and opportunities for the corporate members of Optica. Of course, they would benefit directly from the above programs. In addition, networking among the companies is of essential importance, including stronger integration of young start-ups. In this way, it will be possible to bring the manufacturers of all kinds of optics production machines, the optics manufacturers and the end-users closer together. This will allow a more agile response to deal with major challenges, such as those we have just experienced with the COVID-19 pandemic or the emerging shortage of chips, for example.

Optica can supplement this with targeted and credible market analyses. In this way, a trustworthy partnership can develop from which all sides benefit. This closes the circle, because a strong industry with strong representation effectively advertises the attractiveness of a path into photonics.

I am honored to be nominated as a candidate for the Optica Board.