About
Ulrike Fuchs
asphericon GmbH, Germany
Awards & Distinctions
- Fellow - 2020
- Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award - 2018
- Senior - 2018
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.
