SPIE Elects de Groot into its Presidential Chain

Peter de Groot, chief scientist at Zygo Corp., was elected to serve as the 2023 vice president of SPIE. The election brings de Groot into the SPIE presidential chain. He will serve as president-elect in 2024 and as the society’s president in 2025.

SPIE 2022 President Anita Mahadevan-Jansen made the announcement along with other SPIE election results at this year’s Annual General Meeting of the Society on Aug. 22, during SPIE Optics + Photonics. Terms begin Jan. 1, 2023.

At Zygo, de Groot works on the invention and development of new optical metrology instruments and applications. In addition to 140 patents for new optical instruments and techniques, he has published 200 technical papers, tutorials, and book chapters in physics, education, optics, and metrology.

Top row, from left: Peter de Groot, Jim McNally, Jessica DeGroote Nelson. Bottom row, from left: David Hagan, Miles Padgett, Laura Waller. Courtesy of SPIE.

De Groot has served as both member and adviser to the board of directors at SPIE and is a current member of the financial advisory committee and chair for the symposia committee. De Groot has presented more than 50 papers at SPIE conferences, organizes SPIE conferences, and offers professional short courses in optical metrology. In 2016, he received the society’s Rudolf Kingslake Medal for the most noteworthy original paper in the SPIE journal Optical Engineering.

Alongside de Groot, Bernard Kress, director of XR hardware at Google, will serve as the 2023 SPIE president, while the University of Arizona’s Jennifer Barton will serve as president-elect.

Jim McNally, CEO of StratTHNK Associates, was elected to serve as the 2023 SPIE secretary/treasurer.

Additionally, the following newly elected society directors will serve three-year terms from 2023-2025:

Jessica DeGroote Nelson, Edmund Optics’ senior director of optical product development.
David Hagan, Pegasus Professor and dean of CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida.
Miles Padgett, Royal Society Research Professor and Kelvin Chair at the University of Glasgow.
Laura Waller, professor at the University of California, Berkeley.