Optica Names Rob Devlin the 2025 Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award Recipient
(SOURCE: Optica.org) Boston, MA – Feb, 2025 – Optica is pleased to announce that Rob Devlin, Metalenz Inc, USA, has been selected as the 2025 recipient of the Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award. Devlin is honored for critical contributions to foundational optical metasurface design, pioneering leadership to commercialize metasurface optics, and product development of the first polarization sensor for consumer markets, leveraging on semiconductor foundries for mass production of metaoptics.
Devlin is co-founder and CEO of Metalenz, the first company to commercialize metasurface technology for mass markets. He holds a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering and Materials Science from Drexel University and a PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University in the lab of Professor Federico Capasso.
His research has spanned the topics of nanofabrication, nanophotonics, and materials science. He has authored or co-authored 20+ publications that have provided critical advances and first demonstrations in the field of metasurfaces, including the first demonstration of high-quality visible images taken with metasurface optics. Science Magazine recognized this work as a Top 10 Breakthrough of 2016, and in the same year, Devlin co-founded Metalenz with Professor Capasso and Bart Riley.
At Metalenz, Devlin and his team scaled metasurfaces to be manufactured in standard semiconductor foundries and, as a result, launched metasurfaces into the market, announcing the first metasurfaces in consumer devices in partnership with ST Microelectronics. There are currently more than 100M metasurfaces across consumer and IoT markets resulting from the commercialization efforts at Metalenz. In 2024, the company demonstrated the world’s simplest, secure face authentication solution—Polar ID.
Established in 2017, the Optical Design Innovator Award recognizes significant contributions, at an early career stage, to lens design, optical engineering, or metrology as evidenced by one or more of the following: innovative and rigorous research, optical system design with a foundation in aberration theory, development of advanced metrology capabilities, product development and patents or publications. The award honors Kevin P. Thompson, whose many other accomplishments include leading breakthroughs in the understanding of the aberration fields of a new class of truly non-symmetric optical systems using freeform optical surfaces. It is endowed by several supporters including Jannick Rolland and Synopsys.
