Dr. Craig Hoffman has been appointed Superintendent of the Optical Sciences Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. As Superintendent, he directs the research of approximately 200 scientists and engineers engaged in basic and applied research across a wide swath of optical science. Dr. Hoffman had previously served as Associate Superintendent of the Division for the past 15 years.
Dr. Hoffman began his research career at NRL in 1979 as a National Research Council postdoctoral research associate, becoming an NRL research physicist in 1981. His initial research broke new ground in the use of short pulse lasers to investigate the opto-electronic and surface properties of semiconductors. His research started with wide-gap semiconductors and subsequently expanded to include narrow gap semiconductor used for infrared detection and imaging, superlattices and strained layer superlattices. One highlight of his research was the Quantitative Mobility Spectrum Analysis (QMSA), a technique developed with other NRL researchers to model multi-carrier, multi-layer Hall data and determine carrier densities and mobilities for each layer. This approach has been so successful that the basic NRL patent on it was licensed by industry and has been sold by the vendor as part of their software package for the past 15 plus years.
Dr. Hoffman also performed the bulk of the Navy's and DoD's research on the effects of high intensity laser irradiation on infrared detectors and imaging focal plane arrays for 20 years starting in the early 1980s. This work defined the state of the art for DoD and led to collaborations with Army, Air Force, Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Air Systems Command, and industrial scientists. He has participated on numerous tri-service technical groups and technical study panels in this area at the invitation of both the Air Force and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Dr. Hoffman was recently elected a fellow of the Optical Society of America. He is also a member of the IEEE, the Directed Energy Professional Society, SPIE, Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa.