Barton Elected into SPIE Presidential Chain

Jennifer Kehlet Barton, the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, professor of optical sciences, and director of the BIO5 Institute at the University of Arizona, was elected to serve as the 2022 vice president of SPIE. With her election, Barton joins the SPIE presidential chain and will serve as president-elect in 2023 and as the society’s president in 2024.

Barton is known for her development of miniature endoscopes that combine multiple optical imaging techniques, particularly optical coherence tomography and fluorescence spectroscopy. Her research into light-tissue interaction and dynamic optical properties of blood laid the groundwork for a novel therapeutic laser to treat disorders of the skin’s blood vessels. She has published more than 120 peer-reviewed journal papers in these research areas.

Barton has served on SPIE’s board of directors and on various committees. She serves as symposium co-chair of SPIE Photonics West Bios, and as session chair for the European Conferences on Biomedical Optics. Barton’s awards include the 1997 DJ Lovell Scholarship and the 2016 President’s Award.

Alongside Barton, Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, a professor at Vanderbilt University, will serve as the 2022 SPIE president. Jason Mulliner, CFO at Alluxa Inc., was elected to serve as the 2022 SPIE secretary/treasurer.

The society also announced Renu Tripathi, a professor of physics and engineering at Delaware State University, as the inaugural recipient of the IBM-SPIE HBCU Faculty Accelerator Award in Quantum Optics and Photonics. Tripathi’s winning proposal seeks to demonstrate “a quantum gyroscope with a high rotation sensitivity, suitable for inertial navigation applications.”

The $100,000 award, presented jointly by the IBM-HBCU Quantum Center and SPIE, supports and promotes research and education in quantum optics and photonics within the IBM-HBCU Quantum Center member institutions, which currently includes 23 historically Black colleges and universities. The IBM-SPIE agreement stipulates a joint annual award year through 2025, with each organization providing $50,000 per year for a shared total of $500,000 over five years.

In addition to the announcements and award, the following newly elected society directors will serve three-year terms from 2022-2024:

• Audrey Bowden, the Dorothy Wingfield Phillips Chancellor Faculty Fellow and associate professor of biomedical and electrical engineering and computer science at Vanderbilt University.

• Gong-Ru Lin, distinguished professor and director at National Taiwan University.

• Allison Barto, director at Ball Aerospace.

• Rebecca Fahrig, head of innovations, advanced therapies at Siemens Healthcare GmbH.