Some of the most advanced technology in development, including quantum computers and tools that handle living cells, depends on being able to control laser light with extreme precision.
Hertz Fellow Christopher Panuski knows how hard that is firsthand. Getting light to form a precise pattern takes complex math, careful calibration and hardware that can keep up. He and his colleagues spent several years learning how those pieces fit together, and he says other research groups, in fields such as atomic physics, were spending years on their own versions. His company, Holodyne, is working to change that by making light as programmable as code, so scientists and engineers can spend their time on their own applications and research instead.
Holodyne is an MIT spin-out that pairs spatial light modulators, which work like tiny screens that reshape a laser beam instead of showing an image, with high-performance software to control them. Panuski started the company with his research collaborator Ian Christen, who serves as chief technology officer.
Programmable optics is a shift from the traditional lens, which can control light very accurately but does only one job until someone physically changes it.
That limitation has shaped technology before. Panuski explained that before digital computing caught up, optics was the only practical way to process some kinds of radar images: the signal was recorded on film and passed through a series of lenses that did the math physically. The field eventually moved to digital processing, which Panuski notes was a byproduct of adaptability. On a computer, a new algorithm is a few lines of code. In an optical system, it means rebuilding the hardware. Programmable free-space optics is Holodyne’s answer to that limit.
“You can have one system, but it can do many different things,” Panuski said.
Holodyne grows directly out of the doctoral research Panuski did during his Hertz Fellowship in MIT’s Quantum Photonics Group, where he developed high-speed spatial light modulators and open-source holography software, called slmsuite, that Holodyne now maintains. Every faster device the team built demanded better software to run it, and that experience now defines Holodyne’s approach to hardware-software co-design.
Panuski says the team put the software online as an open-source community tool so other labs would not have to repeat that effort. It serves as a baseline that lets researchers spend less time on the calibration details an optical engineer would otherwise handle.
“We could take one input laser, and we can separate it into a bunch of tiny different tweezers that actually trap atoms. And then we can move those tweezers around to control the interactions between the atoms,” Panuski said.
That kind of control could reach far more researchers, and the possibilities extend beyond the lab. For example, a laser printer or direct-write lithography system traces an image with a single beam that can only be in one place at a time, while Holodyne’s technology can split a laser into many beams that form a pattern together.
“You can have tens of thousands of beams, all moving in concert with one another to produce any desired pattern,” Panuski said.
The software’s reach is what led to the company. As the user base expanded, he says, the back-and-forth with researchers became a drain on his and Christen’s time and resources. A company gave them a way to keep growing the software and, once commercial devices have been pushed to their limits, to design the next generation of devices for applications that today have no solution.
“I see Hertz Fellows going in directions that are fundamentally oriented around how to make the world a better place. And that’s why I love this community.”
Christopher Panuski
Those users now span the entire chain, including the companies that make the devices and the scientists who use them. Holodyne works with quantum computing companies and research groups around the world, optogenetics researchers, biological imaging groups at universities and hospitals, optical communications and directed-energy teams and many of the hardware manufacturers themselves. Among the most rewarding of those collaborations, Panuski says, have been the ones with other Hertz Fellows, who are using Holodyne’s tools to accelerate technologies of their own.
The free software is not directly a revenue stream, he says, but it feeds the company’s long-term plans: feedback from users shows where the real applications are, which tells the team which devices to build.
“We’re ultimately seeding the growth of an entirely new industry by putting state-of-the-art optical capabilities in the hands of customers who previously wouldn’t have had the expertise to be able to use them,” Panuski said. “Now they have the open source tools and community to pursue new directions.”
Panuski, an active-duty U.S. Navy cryptologic warfare officer, says his time on operational deployments taught him to focus on the end user, and that shaped how he approaches the company.
“You can have the best technology in the world, but ultimately how well it performs in challenging environments is dictated on how the end user interfaces with that equipment,” Panuski said.
A native of Davidson, North Carolina, Panuski joined the Hertz Fellowship in 2017, the year he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with degrees in electrical engineering and physics. Academy graduates typically cannot pursue a Ph.D. right after commissioning, and the Fellowship provides up to five years of support.
“The Hertz Fellowship was absolutely critical for me,” Panuski said in a 2023 Hertz profile. “It opened up the possibility of delving into these very technical fields right out of the academy,” Panuski said.
Holodyne is one example of how the Hertz Foundation supports Fellows at every stage of their careers. In 2026, it supported Panuski’s company through the Harold Newman and David Galas Entrepreneurial Initiative. Since 2012, the initiative has backed Hertz Fellows’ entrepreneurial projects with investments of up to $25,000 and mentoring from successful entrepreneurs in the Hertz Community, and has helped Fellows co-found 11 companies.
Panuski serves as community co-chair of the Foundation’s Fellowship and Programs Council. In January 2027, he will co-lead a Hertz forum on the future of national security in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Service, he says, sits at the core of the Hertz Community, a value reflected in the commitment every Fellow signs to assist the nation in times of national emergency.
“I see Hertz Fellows going in directions that are fundamentally oriented around how to make the world a better place. And that’s why I love this community,” Panuski said.
About the Hertz Foundation
The Hertz Foundation is the nation’s preeminent nonprofit organization committed to advancing American scientific and technological leadership. For more than 60 years, it has stood as an unwavering pillar of independent support through the renowned Hertz Fellowship, cultivating a multidisciplinary network of innovators whose work has positively impacted millions of lives. Learn more at hertzfoundation.org.
