William F. Hug

Dr. Hug is founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Photon Systems, a company founded in 1996 to develop deep UV Raman and native luminescence-based sensors as well as key enabling laser and detector technologies. Dr Hug is an expert in electro-optical-mechanic systems design with over 45 years of experience on a wide range of leading-edge systems. Dr. Hug has received awards from NASA and DARPA. Dr. Hug was previously the founder and president of Omnichrome until sold to Melles Griot in 1997. Omnichrome was a successful laser and instrument developer and manufacturer of UV, visible and IR lasers and forensic instruments and was, in the mid 1990’s, the sixth largest manufacturer of lasers in the U.S. Prior to Omnichrome, Dr. Hug was a researcher, manager, and director at Xerox Electro-Optical Systems in Pasadena, CA where he contributed key innovations and patents to the first high speed laser printers as well as many systems and instruments developed for Xerox and the U.S. Department of Defense. Dr. Hug was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Space Propulsion at Univ. of Stuttgart, Germany, and he received a Ph.D. and M.S. from Northwestern University with Ph.D. thesis area, optical properties of high temperature argon plasma, and M.S. thesis area, magnetoplasmadynamic free jets. He received a B.S. from Univ. of Notre Dame. Dr. Hug has over 145 patents and publications.