Rochester, NY--The Optical Society of America (OSA) has named Greg Forbes of QED Technologies as the 2012 recipient of the David Richardson Medal for his contributions in aberration theory, propagation, asymmetric optical system design, and manufacturing for aspheres. Each year, OSA presents the David Richardson Medal in recognition of those who have made significant contributions to optical engineering, primarily in the commercial and industrial sector.
Forbes joined QED in September 2000 as a senior scientist and is based in Sydney, Australia. He developed concepts and processes that underpin the company's subaperture polishing and stitching interferometry systems that have contributed to transforming the way high-precision optics are manufactured.
Following his doctorate at the Australian National University, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Optical Sciences Center (Tucson, 1984), a tenured faculty member of the Institute of Optics (Rochester, 1985–1994), and a Research Professor at Macquarie University (Sydney, 1994–2000).
Through collaborations with graduate students and co-workers, Greg developed efficient, influential schemes for optical system assessment, and global optimization for design. He produced several new concepts in Hamiltonian optics, tailored in part for non-axially symmetric systems; e.g., where surfaces are tilted or decentered. He has also collaborated on the development of unconventional asymptotic methods for wave modeling.