Nick Takaki receives scholarship award

May 9, 2019

A photo of the student.

Nick Takaki, a fourth year PhD student at The Institute of Optics, working with Professor Jannick Rolland, Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering, is the 2019 winner of the Michael Kidger Memorial Scholarship award.

The award will be presented to Nick at the UK Optical Design Meeting at Imperial College, London, on September 19, 2019 by Tina E. Kidger, of Kidger Optics Associates. The award consists of a $5,000 cash grant supported by the Michael Kidger Memorial Scholarship Fund.

Nick’s research focuses on using the mathematics of freeform surface descriptions to develop methods that lead to surfaces which are easier to manufacture and test. The research incorporates the use of both Zernike and 2D-Q orthogonal polynomials whose properties can uniquely contribute to the description of freeform surface shapes. The properties have been leveraged by the 1D-Q polynomials to achieve easier fabrication and test of axisymmetric optical aspheres. Nick hopes to achieve similar improvements through the use of orthogonal polynomials for freeform optics. His work is mentored by Professor Rolland and Greg Forbes.

Nick received a BS and MS in Applied and Computational Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University with honors in August, 2015.