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Precision Optics Corporation Announces Appointment of Dr. Joseph N. Forkey As Chief Scientist

Posted on: Friday, 19 September 2003, 06:00 CDT

GARDNER, Mass., Sept. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Precision Optics Corporation, Inc. today announced the appointment of Dr. Joseph N. Forkey as Chief Scientist. Dr. Forkey's appointment is expected to provide the company significant additional capabilities in optical instrument development, in management of new technology and in potentially significant longer-term initiatives in Biophysics and Biomedical instrumentation, as well as new photonics-based market opportunities.

Dr. Forkey, son of Precision Optics Corporation CEO and Founder Richard E. Forkey, brings an outstanding record of research achievement from Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, including advanced laser measurement of supersonic flow fields, the development and construction of narrow bandwidth molecular line filters and recent single molecule measurements of various biophysical processes including mobility parameters of a major class of "nanomotors." This has been achieved with a new highly accurate single molecule fluorescence polarization microscope developed by Dr. Forkey. This work, recently published in "Nature" and in "Science" includes new applications in so-called "FIONA" ("Fluorescence Imaging with One Nanometer Accuracy") technology.

A summary of Dr. Forkey's Curriculum Vitae follows:

Joseph Forkey received a B.A. in Mathematics Cum Laude, B.A. in Physics, Magna Cum Laude and election to Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in 1989. In 1991 he was awarded an M.A. degree and a Ph.D. in 1996, in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton. His doctoral thesis, entitled "Development and Demonstration of Filtered Rayleigh Scattering: A Laser Based Flow Diagnostic for Planar Measurement of Velocity, Temperature and Pressure" has become a standard reference work in the field. The design and construction of an iodine based molecular line filter for very narrow spectral band analysis of scattering from a narrow linewidth, injection seeded frequency doubled Nd:YAG laser was achieved from this work. He has subsequently provided similar systems under two successive contracts ultimately for Japan's National Aerospace Laboratory -- counterpart to the U.S. NASA.

Since 1996, Dr. Forkey has developed, at the University of Pennsylvania's Muscle Institute, new techniques and instrumentation to allow the measurement of biophysical processes at the single molecule level. His instrument developments have included a highly sensitive single molecule fluorescence polarization microscope, which has achieved 10 millisecond time resolution measurements of single molecule orientations. The measurement results and their applications to the understanding of biological "nanomotors" have been recently published in Nature (International Weekly Journal of Science) and in Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), March and June 2003 issues respectively. The latter publication reported highly successful applications of the so-called "FIONA" ("Fluorescence Imaging with One Nanometer Accuracy") technology.

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