Professor David Brady

David Brady is the J.W. and H.W. Goodman Endowed Chair in Optical Sciences in the Wyant College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. His Ph. D. in Applied Physics from Caltech was awarded for work on artificial neural networks under the guidance of Demetri Psaltis. His early academic career was at the University of Illinois, where he focused on ultrafast and interferometric optical imaging systems. He moved to Duke University in 2001 as the founding director of the Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics. At Duke he led the DARPA AWARE program, which built the world's first terrestrial gigapixel camera (see Nature 486.7403 (2012): 386-389.) He also developed the theory and practice of snapshot compressive imaging, which has substantially impacted the design of tomographic x-ray, holographic, radar, spectral and temporal imaging systems (see IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 38.2 (2021): 65-88.).

For the past decade Brady has focused primarily on pushing the information limits of cameras. He co-founded Aqueti, Inc., which manufactures hardware and software for gigapixel-scale video cameras and from 2016-2019 he built the Camputer lab at Duke Kunshan University to accelerate practical "super camera" systems using artificial neural networks for control, power management and image formation. Since moving to Arizona's College of Optical Sciences in 2021, Brady has worked with Professor Jose Sasian to develop compact microcameras for array imagers and has worked to develop an artificial "visual cortex" for real-time array cameras. He has also developed array camera designs for synthetic aperture lidar.

Brady is a fellow of Optica, SPIE and IEEE and won the 2013 SPIE Denis Gabor Award.