Wolfgang Fink is a German-American theoretical physicist.[1] He is currently an associate professor and the inaugural Maria & Edward Keonjian Endowed Chair of Microelectronics at the University of Arizona.[2] Fink has joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering,[3] Biomedical Engineering,[4] Systems & Industrial Engineering,[5] Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering,[6] and Ophthalmology & Vision Science[7] at the University of Arizona. He is the current Vice President of the Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) Society.[8][9]
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. "summa cum laude" in theoretical physics from the University of Tübingen, Germany (1997).[10][11] He was a senior researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (2001–2009). 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.[12][13] He also held concurrent appointments as Voluntary Research Associate Professor of both Ophthalmology and Neurological Surgery at the University of Southern California (2005–2014).
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[14] (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. The center enacted the only FDA-approved visual prosthesis to date (Argus retinal prosthesis or ARGUS II).[15]
Fink has been awarded 31 US and international patents to date in the areas of autonomous systems, biomedical devices, neural stimulation, MEMS fabrication, data fusion and analysis, and multi-dimensional optimization.[32]