Dr. Robert A. Gonsalves

Bob Gonsalves is an Emeritus Professor in the ECE Department at Tufts University. He received the BSEE at Tufts and the MS and Ph. D. from Northeastern University. He was a Professor at Northeastern for 20 years and spent another 20 years at Tufts. While at Tufts he received the Leibner Award for Distinguished Teaching and Advising and chaired the department for 6 years. His expertise is digital image processing, with applications in graphic arts, medicine, astronomy, and historical images. He is the founder and former President of Lexitek, Inc., which builds innovative optical products. An SPIE Fellow since 1987, he took sabbaticals at Stanford University, Zurich's Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the University of Sydney in Australia.

In 1990 he used Phase Diversity, a method he invented in the 1970’s, to help NASA find a prescription for the flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope. More recently he was an advisor to NASA on the James Webb Space Telescope, which will use Phase Diversity to help align its segmented optics, consulted with Harvard-Smithsonian researchers on imaging exo-planets, and consulted with Lincoln Lab and AOA on Phase Diversity Imaging methods. His most recent research has been on Sequential Diversity Imaging. SDI uses sequential images from a video camera which has an AO system. The sequence of AO changes forms a natural set of phase diversities for adjacent frames of the camera. The concept could be used in any digital camera with an AO and a digital processor to perform image sharpening. No additional element, like a defocused image or a Shack-Hartman sensor, is required.

Professor Gonsalves is a former city official in Woburn, MA, where he was born. He still resides in Woburn - on a family compound on which he designed and built four homes, including a contemporary solar home.