SPIE elects Cather Simpson into presidential chain

SPIE (Bellingham, WA) has elected Cather Simpson of the University of Auckland and Orbis Diagnostics (New Zealand) to serve as the 2025 vice president; she will then serve as president-elect in 2026 and president in 2027. Election results were announced on August 20^th at the SPIE Optics + Photonics event in San Diego, CA.

Simpson, a professor of physics and chemical sciences at the University of Auckland, is also the founder, CEO, and director of Orbis Diagnostics, a microfluidic blood-test platform. Since 2022, she has served on Fisher & Paykel Healthcare’s Board of Directors. She’s received multiple professional recognitions, including the Australian and New Zealand Optical Society’s W.H. (Beattie) Steel Medal; the Pickering Medal from the Royal Society Te Apārangi (New Zealand), a society of which she is a Fellow; and an Ako Aotearoa Award for Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching. Simpson is also an inventor on more than 10 patent families.

Simpson was named an SPIE Fellow Member in 2023; she is also an SPIE Lifetime Member. She served on the SPIE Board of Directors from 2021-2023; as co-chair of the SPIE Micro + Nano Materials, Devices, and Applications conference in 2019; as a frequent judge for the SPIE Prism Awards, Catalyst Awards, and the SPIE Startup Challenge; as a member of the SPIE Education Committee (2019-2020), and of the SPIE Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Committee (2021-2022). She currently chairs the SPIE Publications Committee, and sits on the SPIE Strategic Planning Committee. In 2018, she was featured in the SPIE Women in Optics planner; that same year, Simpson and Orbis Diagnostics won third place in the SPIE Startup Challenge.

Alongside Simpson, Zygo Corporation’s Peter de Groot will serve as the 2025 SPIE president while University of Rochester Professor Julie Bentley will serve as president-elect.

Jim McNally, CEO of StratTHNK Associates, was elected to serve as the 2025 SPIE secretary/treasurer.

The following newly elected Society Directors will serve three-year terms from 2025-2027:

• Alexis Vogt, Endowed Chair and Professor of Optics at Monroe Community College and AmeriCOM’s executive director of Workforce and Higher Education.
• Debbie Gustafson, CEO of Energetiq Technology.
• Brian Pogue, Robert Turell UWMF Professor of Medical Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and editor-in-chief of SPIE’s Journal of Biomedical Optics.
• Kishan Dholakia, a professor and the director of the Centre of Light for Life at the University of Adelaide.

Terms begin on January 1, 2025.