Hello! I’m Donna Waters, the optical design consultant you’ll be working with.
A little about myself:
I began my career in 1990, working at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco and preparing labs for myself and the other physics students at De Anza College.
I subsequently worked for several years as an R&D scientist in thermal protection, photovoltaics, photoelectrochemistry, and ultrafast laser characterization of photoexcited electrons, carrying out the research at NASA-Ames, Sandia National Labs, UCSC Chemistry Dept., ZAE-Bayern, and NREL. During that time, I earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics at UC Santa Cruz.
By 2000, I was working as a staff physicist at Wave Optics, a small fiber optics company in the Bay Area. That was my segue from optical physics into optical engineering. I wanted to ensure that I would have all the right tools and knowledge at my fingertips as an optical engineer, so when the Dotcom Bust hit, I took that as an opportunity to join the master’s program at UCF’s School of Optics (CREOL). During that time, I did some raytracing for the Florida Solar Energy Center using software that’s commonly used for stray light analysis (ASAP). That experience, along with my MS Optics, led to me being hired as a stray light analyst at Ball Aerospace.
Over the years, the scope of my work at Ball expanded beyond stray light into other areas of optics, like optical design and image processing. Though my title was always “optical engineer”, I even worked requirements flowdown on a multibillion-dollar lasercom program for a couple of years. From that, I gained a good understanding of how the various elements of a project (optical, thermal, structural, electronics, etc.) are interwoven and how trades can be made between them to meet top-level system requirements, while minimizing risk and effort.
In early 2013, leveraging those two decades of experience, I founded Proof of Concept Optical Engineering. This past decade as a consultant has been the best of my career so far. I love working directly with customers, especially the entrepreneurs. Sometimes I think my career path has been a little crazy, but no other path could have possibly prepared me as well for solving the variety of problems that I see day to day as an optical design consultant.
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