Events

Wave Front Aberrations, Adaptive Optics, and Applications in Vision Science

Lecture / Panel
 
For NYU Community

Prof. Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan
University of Waterloo (Canada) and University of Michigan


The technique of adaptive optics has revolutionized astronomy. Another major application of adaptive optics is in vision science. In this talk I will introduce the basic principles of adaptive optics and wave front aberrations and then talk about their applications in vision science. More specifically, I will describe a computational model that will predict human vision performance (as measured by visual acuity) based on wave front aberration measurements. A second application is in the study of tear film break-up which is shown to be chaotic.


Biosketch
Prof. Lakshminarayanan (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is currently a visiting professor at the University of Michigan on sabbatical from the University of Waterloo, where he is a professor of vision science, physics and electrical and computer engineering. He was a KITP Scholar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara and has held research and teaching positions at UC Irvine, UC Berkeley and the University of Missouri. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, AAAS, Optical Society of America (OSA), SPIE - the International Society for Optical Engineering, the Institute of Physics (UK), and has worked in a number of areas ranging from quantum physics and spectroscopy, to bioengineering, optics, optometry and ophthalmology and cognitive science. He has published over 300 papers, book chapters, etc. and he served as editor/co–author of more than a dozen books. He is the recipient of a number of awards, the most recent ones being the SPIE Optics educator award (2011) and the Esther Beller Hoffman medal of the OSA (2013). He has been a director of the OSA, and is on the UN’s International Year of Light steering committee. He has served on the US IUPAP committee and was Chair of the US Committee to the International Commission on Optics.