Ulrike Fuchs
07 - 08 October 2025
Málaga, Spain
Events
Ulrike Fuchs
Chair of Optica Awards Council & Director at Large, VP at asphericon
About the Speaker
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.
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 18 years, Fuchs has supervised more than 25 B.S. and M.S. theses in the field of optics, worked as an Associate Editor for Optics Express from 2018 to 2024, and was elected a Fellow of Optica in 2020. Since 2023, she has been a member of the Board of Directors of Optica (2023-2025), actively shaping the future of the optics community.
Fuchs has served 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.
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.
Ulrike Fuchs lives with her husband and two children in Jena, Germany.
