Jannick P. Rolland

Jannick Rolland is the Brian J. Thompson Professor in Optical Engineering at the University of Rochester with joint appointments in the Center for Visual Science and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. She is the director of the Center for Freeform Optics (CeFO) supported by the National Science Foundation in the U.S. and corporations worldwide. She is the CTO and co-founder of LighTopTech, a biotech company that commercializes sub-cellular resolution Gabor-domain optical coherence 3D microscopy, which she invented. She earned an optical engineering diploma from the Institut D'Optique Théorique et Appliquée, France, and MS and PhD in optical science from the University of Arizona.

Rolland thrives in developing novel optical engineering solutions across a wide range of fields: she designed the optics for SPOT4, a satellite in orbit from 2008-2013 to monitor the Earth. In medical imaging, she developed mathematics to describe the “lumpy background” noise that plagues medical images, which gave rise to a widely-adopted method to assess image quality in diagnostic instruments. She invented Gabor-domain optical coherence microscopy for high-definition 3D imaging. She has been recognized as one of eight Influential women pioneers in augmented and virtual reality. In the last ten years, she inspired the broad adoption of freeform optics in imaging systems and addressed a key challenge in AR/VR with a novel type of optical component, the metaform. Freeform and metaform optics are disruptive technologies poised to penetrate a variety of markets.

Rolland is a Fellow of the Society. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2014 David Richardson Medal and the 2020 Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize.