ORA Announces Design Contest Winners

Optical software maker Optical Research Associates (ORA) of Pasadena, Calif., announced it has selected the winners of its annual Student Optical Design Competition. The annual awards, which total $4000, are presented to students in North America working toward undergraduate or graduate degrees and who use the company's Code V or LightTools software to perform research in some area of optical design or engineering. Top awards were presented to Quan Wang and Chia-Yu Chen, PhD candidates at Stanford University, for their research into zoom lenses for cell phone cameras; and Rob Bates, who is pursuing a master's at the University of Arizona, for his project "200 Years in One Design: Landscape Lens to Modern Compact Camera." Also receiving awards were Ramzi Zahreddine, an undergraduate at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, for his design of a laser beam shaping system using spherical GRIN polymer lenses; and Xinye Lou, a PhD candidate at the University of Rochester's Institute of Optics, for his wide field of view head-mounted display for virtual reality.