Mikhail A. Vorontsov received his Ph.D. in physics in 1977 and Doctor of Science in physics and mathematics in 1989, both from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. Currently he is a Professor & Wright Brothers Endowed Chair at the University of Dayton, and founder and CEO for the incubated at the University of Dayton Fitz Center start-up company, Optonicus LLC. The company launched in 2009 with three employees and $63,000 grant, now employed 16 engineers and researches including UD graduated students, and is on track for ~ $25 million in total revenue. Optonicus is focused on the research, development, and marketing of intelligent optical systems used by commercial

and government organizations.

Dr. Vorontsov is recipient of several awards including: ASC Outstanding Engineers’ Scientists' Award (2017), Best conference presentation awards at the DEPS symposium and the ARMY conference (2010), University of Maryland “Outstanding Systems Engineering Faculty” award (2008), U.S. Army Research and Development Achievement Award: “Target-in- the-Loop Beam Control and Active Imaging: Novel Approaches, New Phenomena and Systems” (2007), ARL Achievement Award for Best Publication (JOSA A, Vol.23, N0.9, 2613, 2006):

“Adaptive wavefront control with asynchronous stochastic parallel gradient descent clusters” (2006), ARL Achievement Award for Science. In recognition of the development of a new

generation of adaptive laser communication and imaging systems designed to correct severe optical phase distortion (2000).

Dr. Vorontsov is Principal Investigator (PI) of several research and development programs including the most recent: 1.5M DARPA STTR Phase II Enhancement contract “Scalable adaptive fiber array elements”, (2016), $1.0 M NSF MRI grant “Development of a High-Power Adaptive Phased Fiber-Array Laser System” (2015), $273K AFOSF DURIP grant “High Performance Computational Cluster for Extended-Range Atmospheric Optics Research” (2015), $7,5M AFOSR MURI Grant No: FA9550-12- 1-0449 “Wave Optics of Deep

Atmospheric Turbulence: From Underlying Physics Towards Predictive Modeling, Mitigation, and Exploitation” (2013).

He is co-PI of the recently funded $0.9M HEL-JTO MRI Grant “Novel Characterization Measurements and Meteorological-Driven Modeling of Turbulence and Refraction in the

Lower Atmosphere for Directed Energy Applications” (2017).

From 1997 to 2009 he was a senior physicist and Director of the Intelligent Optics Laboratory in the Computational and Information Sciences Directorate of the Army Research Laboratory. He has published over 327 papers and four books on the subjects of adaptive optics, atmospheric characterization, beam control, nonlinear spatio-temporal dynamics and image processing. His publications received >3400 citations.

He is SPIE, OSA and ARL Fellow.