Quick Facts
Biography
Wolfgang Fink is a German theoretical physicist. He is currently an Associate Professor and the inaugural Edward & Maria Keonjian Endowed Chair of Microelectronics at the University of Arizona. Fink has joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Systems & Industrial Engineering, Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, and Ophthalmology & Vision Science at the University of Arizona.
Research Career & Education
Fink has a B.S. (Vordiplom, 1990) and M.S. (Diplom 1993) degrees in Physics and Physical Chemistry from the University of Göttingen, Germany, and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Tübingen, Germany (1997). He was a Senior Researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2000 - 2009). He was also a Visiting Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology (2001 - 2016), where he founded Caltech's Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory. He also held concurrent appointments as Voluntary Research Associate Professor of both Ophthalmology and Neurological Surgery at the University of Southern California (2005 - 2014).
Active Research Areas
Fink is a specialist in the areas of autonomous systems, biomedical engineering for healthcare, human/brain-machine interfaces, and smart service systems. In particular, his research focuses on autonomous robotic systems for hazardous environments, C4ISR architectures (Tier-Scalable Reconnaissance), vision prostheses for the blind, smart mobile and tele-ophthalmic platforms, ophthalmic instruments and tests, self-adapting wearable sensors, cognitive/reasoning systems, and computer-optimized design.
Fink was a Principal Investigator of the United States Department of Energy's (USDOE's) "Artificial Retina" project (2004–2011), a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary CRADA-based effort to develop an implantable microelectronic retinal device that restores useful vision to people blinded by retinal diseases (Retinitis pigmentosa and Macular degeneration). Furthermore, Fink is Caltech's founding Co-Investigator of the NSF-funded Center for Biomimetic Microelectronic Systems (2003-2010), awarded in 2003 to University of Southern California, Caltech, and UC Santa Cruz. His center enacted the only FDA-approved visual prosthesis to date (Argus retinal prosthesis or ARGUS II).
Honors & Awards
- da Vinci Fellow 2015 for "innovative, productive and highly recognized engineering research" at the University of Arizona.
- Senior Member IEEE
- College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) (inducted in 2012)
Patents
Fink has been awarded 15 patents to date in the areas of autonomous systems, biomedical devices, MEMS fabrication, data fusion and analysis, and multi-dimensional optimization.