UD Story
Joe Haus, Ph.D., has been chair of the electro-optics graduate program – one of seven nationwide – for the past eight years.
His work at the university has helped it gain millions of dollars in state and federal grants to help commercialize sensor and laser technology. Haus also spearheads UD efforts to secure corporate partnerships with industry leaders: One such partnership is the Ladar Optical Communications Institute, established in 2006.
With Haus' leadership, LOCI will establish a curriculum dedicated to ladar technology and consolidate the brain power of the region's ladar researchers.
Haus, who taught for 15 years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., before coming to UD, received his bachelor's and master's degrees in physics from John Carroll University. He earned his doctorate in statistical physics from Catholic University of America.
Haus is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America and SPIE, the international optics society.
March 2008
The Story - For me, the best outcomes would be that people follow-up on your research, that they think it's important enough to try to find something beyond it. You don't want to just produce a final product and that's it. I also like to see things commercialized; it would be a real great feeling to have something that ends up being a product in the marketplace.
I'm Joe Haus and I'm the director of the electro-optics program at the University of Dayton. I'm responsible for getting graduate students into the program, finding positions for them in various research labs and I do research myself.
We have a proposal into Ohio to create a commercialization of technologies for sensors. Some of those are remote sensors. The remote sensor technologies that we're mostly involved with is something called ladar, which is like radar except for laser work. It's laser detection and ranging. You send out a laser pulse, you get it back, and by the time it takes to go there and back, you know how far it is, because it travels at the speed of light. You can use this technology to look at objects out at a distance. The distance may be a hundred meters, actually maybe only a few centimeters, if you want to do a very fine ranging, or it could even be kilometers.
That technology has lots of applications. For instance, in the DARPA grand challenge, they had these cars that, once they set them to go, they were on their own. Nobody was giving them information, nobody was driving them. They were just on their own. Every one of the cars that finished the race, in the last version of the grand challenge, had a ladar system as a sensor on it. It was considered a critical element of what they were going to do. The laser would tell them if there was a boulder in the middle of the road. The ladar system would tell them where the edges of the road are and they would be able to follow where the path was supposed to be and not fall off the edge of a cliff. The new system that we'd like to have is maybe every automobile has a ladar system on it. You could see this technology sort of blossoming into a much more mature technology by some of the things that we're going to work on and perhaps commercialize.
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