Dr. Stefan Bäumer

Optical system designer | Trainer at High Tech Institute | Principal Scientist, TNO

Dr. Stefan Bäumer is a German physicist and optical system designer with more than thirty years of industrial experience spanning consumer electronics, semiconductor lithography, space instrumentation and medical imaging. He is Principal Scientist and Senior Optical System Designer at TNO in Delft, a member of the European Optical Society Industrial Advisory Board, a board member of the European Optical Society (EOS) & the Deutsche Gesellschaft für angewandte Optik (DGaO) and a trainer at High Tech Institute, where he has taught the Modern Optics for Optical Designers course since 2001.

Bäumer is the editor of the Handbook of Plastic Optics (Wiley-VCH), described by its publisher as the only book to describe in detail all aspects of plastic optics from design issues to production technology and quality control. He is an editorial board member of Advanced Optical Technologies and JPhys Photonics, has served as guest editor of special issues on space optics, plastic optics and freeform optics, and has co-edited proceedings of the SPIE Optical Engineering and Applications symposium. His publications span optics, lens design and metrology and have accumulated over 700 citations.

Selected publications

Bäumer, S. (ed.) Handbook of Plastic Optics. Wiley-VCH, 2nd edition, 2010. ISBN 9783527409402.

Bäumer, S. et al. “Submicrometer nanostructure-based RGB color filters for CMOS image sensors.” ACS Photonics, 6(10), 2536–2543 (2019). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.9b00522

Bäumer, S.; Werij, H. “Space optics.” Advanced Optical Technologies, 7(5), 277–278 (2018). DOI: 10.1515/aot-2018-0057

Bäumer studied physics at the University of Bonn and at Washington State University, where he received his Master of Science in 1988. He completed his doctorate at the Institute of Optics at the Technical University of Berlin in 1995, investigating optical metrology. After graduating he joined Philips in Eindhoven, where he spent seventeen years across Philips Centre for Industrial Technology, Philips High Tech Plastics, Philips Applied Technologies, Philips Research and Philips Lighting, ending as Senior Principal Engineer.

The plastic-optics work at Philips produced the knowledge base for the Handbook of Plastic Optics, which Bäumer edited and partly authored and which brought together, for the first time in a single reference, the full chain from optical design through molding process to metrology and quality control. The first edition appeared in 2005; a second, expanded edition followed in 2010 with new chapters on injection-molding equipment and recent application areas. During the same period, he began teaching CMOP at Philips’ Centre for Technical Training (CTT) in Eindhoven. After the CTT was restructured and parts of it evolved into High Tech Institute, he continued his role there from 2001 onwards.

In 2012 Bäumer moved to the Optics group of TNO in Delft, where in 2015 he became a member of TNO’s principal scientists group, taking on co-responsibility for the direction of optics research. At TNO his work spans a wide spectrum: semiconductor process metrology in close collaboration with ASML, space and earth-observation instruments including systems for atmospheric gas monitoring, medical instrumentation including handheld retinal cameras, and more recently dielectric meta surfaces and freeform optics. The breadth of that portfolio maps directly onto the CMOP curriculum, which he continually refreshes with current application examples from his TNO project work.

The central message in his trainings is that optics is an enabling technology: understanding it at a high level gives engineers the ability to judge what is feasible and where the boundaries of a design lie, before committing to expensive detailed simulation or prototyping.

At High Tech Institute, Stefan Bäumer teaches:

• Modern Optics for Optical Designers – Part 1 – fifteen half-day sessions covering optical basics including electromagnetic theory, polarization, light and matter, diffraction, image formation and assessment, gratings and applications including micro-optics, waveguiding, lasers, lithography, non-linear optics and biomedical photonics. Certified by euspen and DSPE; leading to the ECP² certificate.
• Modern Optics for Optical Designers – Part 2 – fifteen half-day sessions covering optical system design, building on Part 1 to address real-world system architecture, tolerancing and performance assessment.

These two courses has become one of the most comprehensive optical courses in Western Europe. They start with the necessary theoretical basics, concentrating on practical optical system design and end with a broad overview of optical applications. Bäumer feels it’s essential that trainees acquire a broad view on optics. “That is why we have many sessions during this course. Trainees gain insight in all aspects of optics, on a high level. It’s hard but worthwhile, former participants say.”

What distinguishes his teaching is the combination of thirty years of applied optical system design across consumer electronics, semiconductor lithography, space instrumentation and medical imaging with a continuously updated curriculum drawn from active research at TNO, one of Europe’s leading applied-science organizations.

Dr. Stefan Bäumer is Principal Scientist and Senior Optical System Designer at TNO and a trainer at High Tech Institute, where he has taught the Modern Optics for Optical Designers course since 2001. He holds a doctorate in physics from the Technical University of Berlin (1995) and a Master of Science from Washington State University (1988).