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Erkin Sidick was born in Aksu city of the Uyghur Region located in the North-Western part of China. After earning his BS degree, he worked as a teacher at Xinjiang University from Feb. 1983 to Sep. 1985. During this time he spent one year at Shanghai Jiaotung University as a domestic visiting scholar, and studied electro-magnetics and micro-wave technology. In Sep. 1985, Erkin Sidick went to Osaka Electro-Communication University (OECU) of Japan as a research associate, where he conducted research on micro-wave and mm-wave layered ferrite waveguide devices. During a period of 2 and a half years, he published 19 research papers in top-level international journals as well as Japanese and international conferences. He returned from Japan to Urumchi in Apr. 1988. In Sept. of the same year he went to the USA to earn his graduate degrees.
CSUN. Erkin studied for his Master's degree at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) from Sep. 1988 to May 1990 in Physics. Although this is a new major for him (his original major is electrical engineering), he did very well in his course work, research and teaching. His Master's thesis was published in the Journal of Applied Physics, and he received T. C. Liang's Memorial Award in 1989, and the Best Teaching Assistant Award in 1990, from the Department of Physics at CSUN.
UC Davis. In 1990, Erkin Sidick got admissions to doctoral programs from 6 universities, including the University of Utah, University of Southern California, and the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), and he chose UC Davis. By the time he finished his doctoral studies in March 1995, he co-authored 10 journal papers, 3 book chapters, and 7 conference papers from his work at UC Davis. One of the reviewers of his paper, Nobel prize winner Dr. A. F. Huxley, is said to be a grandson of the Periodic Table inventor Darwin, and recommended one of Erkin's papers to Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. He used in his dissertation only half of the achievements that he obtained in his Ph.D. research, and he was chosen twice as the Finalist for the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award and as the winner of the Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award. The latter is a highly competitive award given to only one Ph.D. graduate during an academic year in the Department of Electrical Engineering at UC Davis.
Sandia National Labs. Erkin Sidick worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate jointly at UC Davis and Sandia National Laboratories (Livermore, California) until Sep. 1996, under the guidance of a world-famous scientist, the inventor of FROG ( Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating), Dr. Rick Trebino (Dr. Trebino is currently the chairman of the Physics Department at Georgia Institute of Technology). Where he designed and developed a micro-machined fiber-optic laser trap used to capture and manipulate biological micro particles, and a nonlinear multi-element optical achromatic phase-matching system used in second-harmonic generation of broadband and tunable lasers as well as optical ultra-short pulses. During this period, he co-authored one patent, 4 journal papers in the highest-level international journals such as Optics Letters, and 6 conference papers. During this time as well as when he was a graduate student at UC Davis, Erkin also taught upper-division undergraduate courses in electrical engineering as a part-time faculty at UC Davis and as a Lecturer at California State University, Sacramento.
CVI. In Sep. 1996, Erkin Sidick started an industrial Research and Development (R&D) career at CVI Laser Corporation (Livermore, California), where he served as a Senior Development Engineer and the Manager of Coating Department. In this company, Erkin designed and developed new optical thin-film components, such as anti-reflection coatings, beam-splitters, this-film polarizers, polarization beam-splitters, partial-reflectors and mirrors, and so on, and improved optical coating deposition processes of electron-beam high-vacuum (10-6 Torr) chambers. He also designed, developed and built a White-Light Interferometer optical instrument (both LabView software and optical-electrical hardware) used to measure the nonlinear phases of optical components. At that time there were only about 3 such pieces of instruments in various laboratories around the world. He also designed and built a small size lock-in amplifier electronic instrument used to measure ultra-low level (micro-volt) electronic signals.
WaveSplitter. Erkin joined WaveSplitter Technologies (WST) Inc. (Fremont, California) in March 2000 as a Senior Optical Engineer, and lateral was promoted as an Engineering Manager. At one time, he managed 12 engineers and technicians. In this company he carried out technology evaluation, new technology and new product development, project and engineering management, and patent review in the fields of passive optical components for fiber-optic communications. He served as a technical architect for several optical components, and competed by himself alone with several major Japanese companies including NEL, NEC, Hitachi and Sumitomo in Interleaver technology based on both fused-fiber and Planar Lightwave Circuits (PLC), in many occasions deeply impressing his counterparts in those big companies with his technical, negotiation and language skills. The fused-fiber Fourier-filter Interleavers produced by WST were chosen in 2001 by several big long-haul communications systems companies such as Siemens, Lucent and NEC as the best product in the world.
MFSI. In May 2003, Erkin joined MicroFluidic Systems Inc. (Pleasanton, California), a bio-technology start-up company that develops biological instruments for the analysis and detection of biological and chemical agents in the air, after WST moved its engineering operations to Taiwan. In this company, he successfully designed and built a multi-channel excitation-emission (flourescence)-detection optical module that carries out optical analysis on DNA's amplified by a PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) process.
From 1996 to 2002, Erkin co-founded two high-technology companies in the Silicon Valley of California, as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and the Vice-President of Engineering, respectively, in the fields of optical communications. But both companies could not fly off due to the huge down-turn in the world-wide optical telecommunications industry occurred in the last a couple of years.
JPL.
Erkin Sidick joined Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL,
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov) in
Pasadena, California, in Jan. 2004 as a Senior Optical
Engineer. He has worked for several major space telescope
projects including AMT, AMD, MOST, TPF-C, and Seismic Imager. He is currently working for
WFIRST-AFTA Coronagraph telescope project. His areas of
expertise include optical error budget, specification of
optical components used in space telescopes, integrated
modeling, and wavefront-sensing and control using active
optics. Until Sept. 2015, he authored and/or co-authored 37
pieces of journal and conference papers since joining JPL,
received 8 NASA awards, and 14 JPL awards. One
Spot Award received from JPL reads: "For the continued
development of the Space Telescope Error Budget tool and
integrated optical-mechanical-thermal modelling capability
enabling an accelerated design cycle." One
of the "Certificate of Recognition" Erkin received
from NASA is for developing an Adaptive Cross-Correlation
Algorithm for Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing using extended
scenes.
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