Roland Winston

Roland Winston is a leading figure in the field of nonimaging optics and its applications to solar energy, and is sometimes termed the "father of non-imaging optics". He is the inventor of the compound parabolic concentrator(CPC), a breakthrough technology in solar energy. He is also a former Guggenheim Fellow, past head of the University of Chicago Department of Physics, a member of the founding faculty of University of California Merced, and as of 2013, head of the California Advanced Solar Technologies Institute.

He holds more than 25 patents, chiefly related to solar energy, and has been figuratively said to have a "patent on the sun".

Winston enrolled as an early entrant at Shimer College in 1950, transferring to the University of Chicago after two years. He received a BA from Shimer in 1953, in a graduating class of 11, including future cosmologist Jerome Kristian. Continuing with advanced undergraduate study at the University of Chicago, he received a BS in 1956.

Winston remained at University of Chicago for his graduate work in physics, completing his MS in 1957 and his Ph.D. in 1963. He studied under figures including Yoichiro Nambu and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Winston's doctoral dissertation was on "observable hyperfine effects in muon capture by complex nuclei."

Winston initially developed the underlying concept of the CPC for use in the study of Cherenkov radiation while working at Argonne National Laboratory in 1966. He was prompted to invent the CPC several years later in 1974, when Argonne director Robert Sachs asked him if it would be possible to extend the parabolic approach to solar energy applications, and if so, whether it would be superior to the existing systems that used imaging optics. Only a year after the invention of the CPC, it was discovered that this design had been anticipated by hundreds of millions of years by the eyes of the horseshoe crab. The paper announcing this discovery was also coauthored by Winston.

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