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 Ed Hagerott was
born in Bismarck
and raised in Mandan,
North Dakota. After graduating from Mandan
High School in 1956, he
attended St. John’s University
in Collegeville, Minnesota. His
summers during these college years were spent working
as a surveyor
on the North Dakota State Highway Department.
After
graduating from St. John’s in 1960 with
his BA Physics degree, Ed went to
work in Paul Halderman’s optics group at Northrop Nortronics in Hawthorne, California. Paul
immediately sent Ed to the Technical
Book store on Spring Street in Los Angeles to buy copies of Conrady’s
“Applied
Optics and Optical Design”, Vol I and II, as well as a copy of Peter’s
seven
place trig tables. Ed did a consider
amount of raytracing with the Conrady (L,U) method on a Frieden
calculator.
Co-worders at Nortronics were Paul Glamkowski and Tom Godfrey. Tom and Ed took Walter Wallin’s optical
design course at UCLA together.
Ed
then accepted a position in
Hank Frels’ optics group at Hughes Aircraft, Culver City. He
was mentored by Marcel Gawartin and did optical design
using the
Luneberg (h,theta) raytrace method. Co-workers
at HAC include Victor Beelik, Jerry Rosenblatt,
Irving Sandback,
Bob Ginsberg, and Ervin (Brad ) Bradley.
Since Wallin’s
course was the
only optical design course offered on the west coast at that time, Ed
applied
to the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, NY. He received the American Optical fellowship
and received his MS optics degree in 1965. Ed
felt fortunate that he was able to take both semesters
of Kingslake’s
optics class as well as both semesters of Robert Hopkins’
computer-aided
optical design courses. For his master’s
thesis, Ed constructed a rotational shearing interferometer under the
direction
of Dr. M.V.K.Murty.
Ed then went to
Itek in Lexington,
Massachusetts
and worked in groups headed initially by Bob Shannon and then, Robert
Hilbert. Co-workers included Bob
Fischer, now president of Optics 1, David Shafer, east coast
consultant, Don
Dilworth who wrote Synopsis, and Chuck Rimmer and Mark Kahan, now with
Optical
Research.
After Itek, Ed
accepted a
position with Optical Research Associates in Pasadena, CA
in 1968. In his ten years at ORA, Ed
learned a lot about optical design from Tom Harris, especially
correction of
seconday spectrum, and a lot about zoom lens design from Darryl
Gustafson.
After
ORA, Ed accepted a senior
scientist position in Russ Temple’s group at Xeros EOS.
In 1982, he became the manager of optical
engineering at AeroJet ElectroSystems in Azusa, CA. In 1990, Ed spent a year at the Lawrence
Livermore Lab, but didn’t care for the Livermore
area.
Ed
then accepted a position at
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA
in Dr. James B. Breckinridge’s
optics group. Ed is currently a
principal engineer and the supervisor of optical technology in the
Space
Instruments Section. Ed was also the
Cognizant Optical Engineer for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) optics,
and
retired on May 7, 2004, after being at JPL for thirteen years.
After his retirement, Ed
Hagerott can be reached by phone
at (626) 355-3886, or by mail at 136 West Bonita Avenue, Sierra
Madre, CA 91024. Ed's
home e-mail is hagerott@ix.netcom.com
. He and his wife Rosemary have been married for forty years and have
two
children, Ed Jr. a real estate lawyer in Los
Angeles
and Katherine, a nurse in Burbank. Ed and Rosemary are still waiting for
grandchildren.
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