Group Members

Photo of James Leger

James Leger, Principal Investigator

James R. Leger is professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he holds the Cymer Professorship for Advanced Optical Systems, Metrology, and Lasers, and the Taylor Distinguished Professorship. His interests include laser systems, microoptics, diffractive optics, computational imaging, and metrology.

email: leger@umn.edu
Photo of Hung-Sheng Chiang

Hung-Sheng Chiang, researcher

Hung-Sheng is currently a Researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has been working on building and characterizing passively phase-locked fiber laser arrays. He experimentally demonstrated Kramers-Kronig self-phasing in this laser architecture. Recently, his research is shifting from CW lasers towards pulsed lasers. He envisages a new class of pulsed lasers that are powerful enough to ignite nuclear fusion reactions or serve as the building blocks of next-generation particle accelerators. He completed his PhD degree in Physics in 2011 here at University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He specializes in condensed-matter physics.

email: chia0078@umn.edu
Photo of Di Lin

Di Lin, post-doc

Di received his B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2008. In 2015, he completed his dissertation on the metrology and design of gradient-index optical materials at the same institution and received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering. His current research involves image retrieval algorithms using information from indirect photons and the application of inverse methods.

email: linx0284@umn.edu
Photo of Mint Kunkel

Mint Kunkel, graduate student

Mint completed a bachelor's degree in physics at Carleton College in 2012. He is now a doctoral candidate in Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include coherent beam combining, ultrafast fiber lasers, and numerical modeling of optical systems.

email: kunke097@umn.edu
Photo of Takahiro Sasaki

Takahiro Sasaki, graduate student

Takahiro received his Bachelor's and Master's degree in Electronic Engineering, focusing on optics, from Osaka University (Osaka, Japan). Currenlty he is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in scientific computation at the Univeristy of Minnesota. His research includes a combination of optics, numerical methods and parallel computing.

email: sasa0027@umn.edu
Photo of Erik Tilseth

Erik Tilseth, graduate student

Erik received his B.S. in Physics from the University of Minnesota in 2016, and is now a first-year Ph.D student in Electrical Engineering at the same institution. He is currently investigating phase shifts due to the Optical Kerr Effect in coherently-combined pulsed fiber lasers. This work builds on prior discoveries of Kramers-Kronig phase shifts in similar laser architectures.

email: tilse006@umn.edu
Photo of Connor Hashemi

Connor Hashemi, undergraduate student

Connor is currently a Junior in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota and expected to graduate with a 5-year masters in Spring 2019. His current research is on incorporating computer vision techniques to help collect plenoptic data.

email: hashe037@umn.edu