Goyal Elected OSA Fellow
By Liz Sheeley
Associate Professor Vivek Goyal (ECE) has been elected a Fellow of The Optical Society (OSA) “for outstanding inventions in computational imaging and sensing, including unprecedented demonstrations of the utility of weak, mixed, and indirect optical measurements.”
“I’m deeply honored to be elected to Fellow of the OSA, especially since my research career started far from optics,” says Goyal. “It’s a testament to the value in letting academic research be driven by curiosity.”
According to the OSA, “Fellows are members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. No more than 10 percent of the total OSA membership may be chosen as Fellows, making the process both highly selective and competitive.”
“Goyal’s innovations have changed our understanding of what is possible with optical measurements,” says colleague Professor Selim Ünlü (ECE, MSE).
Ünlü highlighted Goyal’s work in demonstrating that very few detected photons are sufficient for imaging. His research has focused on using very small amounts of information, like a weak light signal, to extract much more information than seems possible. In one recent publication in Nature, Goyal and his team demonstrated a way to extract a full-color 2D picture of a scene from a photograph of indistinct shadows, known as a penumbrae, on a neighboring wall—a way to see around a corner.