Joseph W. Goodman

Career and research Goodman has held a number of positions in the field of optics, including the presidency of the Optical Society of America in 1992.

From 1958 through 1962, he was a research assistant in the Stanford Electronics Laboratories. During 1962 and 1963, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, under the auspices of the Royal Norwegian Society for Scientific and Industrial Research. He returned to Stanford in 1963 as a research associate, a position he held until 1967. In 1967, he was appointed assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford. He was promoted to associate professor in 1969 and to professor in 1972. In 1988, he was appointed chairman of the department of electrical engineering and named the William E. Ayer Professor of Electrical Engineering. In 1996, he stepped down as chairman and assumed the position senior associate dean for faculty and academic affairs in the school of engineering. For the duration of the summer of 1999, he was the acting dean of engineering. Goodman assumed emeritus status on January 1, 2000.

During the academic year 1973–1974, he was a visiting professor at the Institut d'Optique, Orsay, France. In the summer of 1984, he was the William Girling Watson Traveling Scholar at Sydney University, Sydney, Australia. the 1987 Dennis Gabor Award of the International Optical Engineering Society (SPIE) for his contributions to holography, optical processing and optical computing, the 1995 Esther Hoffman Beller Medal of the OSA, and the 1990 Frederic Ives Medal, the highest award of the Optical Society of America. In 2018 he was elected one of 16 Honorary Members of the OSA. In 2007, he received the SPIE Gold Medal, the highest award of that society, and in 2009 he was named the winner of the Emmett Leith Medal of the OSA. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1987, and a Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. Also in 1996, he received an honorary D.Sc. degree from the University of Alabama, and in 2012 he received an honorary D.Sc. degree from the St. Petersburg (Russia) the National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics. He is the author of approximately 220 technical publications, including the textbooks Introduction to Fourier Optics (1968, Second Edition 1996, Third Edition 2005, Fourth Edition 2017), Statistical Optics (1985, Second Edition 2015), Speckle Phenomena in Optics (2006, Second Edition 2020) and (with R.M. Gray) Fourier Transforms: An Introduction for Engineers (1995). His first full-length publication (Proc. I.E.E.E., Vol. 53, 1688 (1965)) was named a "Citation Classic" by the Institute for Scientific Information.

Business roles

Goodman has served as a director of several corporations, including Optivision, Inc. (of which he was a co-founder), ONI Systems (for which he was the founding chairman of the board), and E-TEK Dynamics. He served on the board of directors for Ondax, Inc. from its founding until December 2004, and as the chairman of the Board of Nanoprecision Products, Inc., a company he co-founded, until September 2006.

Lectures

1992 - Optical logic for subsystems Lecture sponsored by the Dept. of Electrical and Computer engineering, University of California, San Diego. Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series. Digital object made available by UC San Diego Library.