SPIE Member Craig Hoffman has been appointed Superintendent of the Optical Sciences Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. As Superintendent, he directs the research of approximately 200 scientists and engineers engaged in all facets of basic and applied research in optical science.
Hoffman had previously served as associate superintendent of the division for the past 15 years.
Hoffman is an expert in short pulse lasers to investigate the opto-electronic and surface properties of semiconductors. One highlight of his research was the Quantitative Mobility Spectrum Analysis (QMSA), a technique developed with other NRL researchers to model multi-carrier, multi-layer Hall data and determine carrier densities and mobilities for each layer. This approach has been so successful that the basic NRL patent on it was licensed by industry and has been sold by the vendor as part of their software package for more than 15 years.
Hoffman also performed the bulk of the Navy's and the Department of Defense's research on the effects of high intensity laser irradiation on infrared detectors and imaging focal plane arrays for 20 years starting in the early 1980s.
