Stefan Weber has a long-standing background in optics and photonics. He was on the management board of two successful start-ups: SwissLitho AG, developing rapid prototyping nanolithography tools, and modum.io AG, where he was deploying novel IoT trackers in the Pharma supply chain for temperature monitoring. Before that, he was product manager at Jenoptik creating high-precision wavefront sensors for the semiconductor equipment industry.
He did his post-doc at the EPFL in Switzerland developing new types of deformable mirrors and believes that ‘affordable, easy to use, high-performance correction devices will make their way onto every researcher’s optics table and will be part of the design of many optical instruments’.
‘Nobel laureate Eric Betzig predicts that in microscopy, adaptive optics (AO) will become as widespread as it is already in astronomy, and I expect the same to happen to other fields as well,’ said Weber.
However, he sees three challenges: ‘First, the hardware must become customizable and affordable; second, the integration of AO components into optical systems must be seamless; and third, the user experience must be right, meaning the technology must become virtually invisible to the end customer, microscopy users.’
You can find Weber online at linkedin.com/in/stefanmartinweber or orcid.org/0000-0003-1700-7535. In 2023, he plans to attend Photonics West, the EPIC AGM in Helsinki in March and OPIE in Yokohama in April.
Organisation: Phaseform
Role: CEO and co-founder
Based in: Freiburg, Germany
Education: PhD, physics at the FU (Free University) Berlin