Introducing Dr. Ashcraft

Hey folks! This is Postdoc Justin, here to announce a recent milestone achieved by one of the members of our team!

Last week, on April 15th, Jaren Ashcraft successfully defended his thesis focused on the development of open-source physical optics modeling packages, use of Gaussian Beamlet Decomposition in optical modeling, and polarization ray tracing in optical system modeling. He absolutely nailed it, in my humble opinion, and the committee thought so too! We are all so proud of him and wish him the best of luck at UC Santa Barbara, where he will continue his optical modeling work in preparation for high contrast imaging onboard the Habitable Worlds Observatory, supervised by friend-of-UASAL Dr. Max Millar-Blanchaer!

Jaren standing on his soap box, discussing the importance of open source. Photo credit: Chia-lin Ko

Jaren with his in-person thesis committee! Left to right: Prof. Daewook Kim, Prof. Ewan Douglas, Dr. Jaren Ashcraft, Prof. Lars Furenlid. Not pictured: Prof. Olivier Guyon

While he’s still around for a few more weeks, we are all going to miss him dearly when he takes off. Even though I’ve only joined the group relatively recently, I could immediately tell how Jaren’s positive and welcoming attitude has fostered such a wonderful working environment within UASAL, and this is clearly evident in the efforts some of our group members undertook to make sure his defense was special! Postdoc Ramya and grad student Kian went through extra effort to obtain these awesome shirts with the logo of Jaren’s open-source package PokE for the entire group to wear at his defense!

Photo credit: Ashcraft family

Ewan also prepared a laser-etched wooden sword as a gift, intended for the so-called “snake-fight” a PhD student may undertake as part of their dissertation defense.

Yes, Ewan gave Jaren sword-fighting lessons too. Kian described the training effort as “wholesome.”

At any rate, congratulations to the new Dr. Ashcraft once again!! We’re excited to see what the future brings you!

Dr. Ashcraft celebrating in the LOFT lab space. Photo credit: Maggie Kautz

P.S., if you’re interested in some of the awesome open-source software Jaren has developed, check out his github!

P.P.S., we’re hoping to have more blog authors and more regular posts, so stay tuned!