William E. Humphrey

William E. Humphrey received a BA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1956 and 1961, respectively. Co-founder of two companies, Optical Research and Development Corp. and Humphrey Instruments Inc., Humphrey devoted his career to inventing and developing new optical devices. Humphrey Instruments Inc. was a leading US company in the field of automated ophthalmic instrumentation and is now a division of Carl Zeiss, Inc. Among the many successful products developed by Humphrey, the automatic visual field tester used to manage glaucoma has become the standard for measuring the visual field.

As a physicist at the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Lab, Humphrey pioneered the use of computers to free scientists from the calculation and bookkeeping tasks that plagued researchers in the field of high energy particle interactions at that time. He was a Fellow of OSA and recipient of the 1994 Edwin H. Land Medal “for outstanding work in the fields of ophthalmic and stabilized optics as an entrepreneur, an inventor, and an innovator."