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Tecnológico de Monterrey Student Member profile: Rodrigo Ponce-Diaz

by Carlos López-Mariscal

Early this year, one of the founding member of our chapter, embarked on a long journey towards a research stay overseas. Rodrigo Ponce-Díaz , a graduate student in the Optical Engineering graduate program at Tec joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Connecticut in order to undertake experimental work towards his doctoral dissertation.

Rodrigo works in OSA fellow Dr. Bahram Javidi 's group and, along with a group of students, is developing original research on twisted nematic liquid crystal displays (TNLCD). One of the main applications of TNLCDs is to provide wavefront modulation used in digital holography. In essence, a wavefront can be tailored to an arbitrary spatial profile, both in aplitude and phase. The modulation imposed on this synthetic wavefront can contain information on the spatial configuration of objects and can be used to subsequently reconstruct the original object.

Under Dr. Javidi's supervision, Rodrigo works on the digital magnification and reconstruction of 3-dimensional objects. "The idea of digital holography is an old one, but its importance has been greatly increased as digital cameras and displays have become readily available in recent times" says Rodrigo.

As an undergraduate, he spent time doing research work at INAOE in Puebla , Mexico and at The University of Texas at Arlington . He worked on joint transform algorithms and models for character recognition using TNLCDs.

Rodrigo's experience abroad has been an incentive for other members of the Chapter, who are at the stage of deciding on a research topic or considering entering the graduate program. His research stay was made possible thanks to funding from the Research Chair in Optics at Tecnológico de Monterrey .