Marija Strojnik Scholl


Marija Strojnik Scholl (born 13 July 1950 in Ljubljana) is a Slovene astrophysicist currently working as a distinguished professor at the Optical Research Center in León, Mexico. She is best known for developing an autonomous system for optical navigation based on CCD technology which is currently used in nearly all commercial aircraft and numerous spacecraft.[1][2]

Marija Strojnik Scholl
Born (1950-06-13) June 13, 1950
NationalitySlovene
Alma materArizona State University
University of Arizona
Known fordeveloping a system for autonomous optical navigation
Scientific career
Fieldsastrophysics, infrared technology, infrared spaceborne remote sensing
InstitutionsRockwell International
Honeywell
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Centro de Investigaciones en Optica

Early life and education

Strojnik Scholl was born as the only daughter in the family of Aleš Strojnik, a distinguished engineer. She developed interest in optics at an early age, when accompanying her father to work. After graduating from high school, she enrolled in the physics program at the University of Ljubljana; however, her parents emigrated to the United States soon after that, and she followed them to Tempe, Arizona where her father became a professor at the Arizona State University. There, Strojnik Scholl finished her undergraduate studies in only two years, as the only woman in her class. She continued postgraduate studies in Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona and received her doctorate in 1979 as the first woman in the history of the optics department.[2][3] She was awarded two other M.S. degrees, one in Engineering (Engineering Executive Program) by the University of California at Los Angeles and another one in Physics by the Arizona State University.[4]

Career

Specializing in infrared physics, she became manager of the optics department at the Rockwell International corporation, then a senior engineer at Honeywell and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). At JPL, she designed, developed and implemented a novel system for autonomous optical navigation using star charts and an intelligent CCD-based camera. This system is the basis for autonomous navigation in all commercial aircraft, in satellites forming the GPS network, and others. The autonomous navigation system was used to facilitate navigation of the NASA's Cassini–Huygens probe to Saturn in 2005.[2][3]

Based on her merits, Strojnik Scholl became a distinguished professor at the Optical Research Center (Centro de Investigaciones en Optica) in Mexico where she has been working on a method for direct detection of exoplanets using interferometry.[1] She is a Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA) and SPIE, and was the editor of the journal Applied Optics, Infrared for two terms[5] in addition to the Infrared Physics and Technology and The Scientific World Journal.[6]

Awards

She received The International Society for Optics and Photonics' (SPIE) George W. Goddard Award in 1996, as the first woman.[2][5] She is also member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences since 2001. In 2018, Professor Strojnik Scholl was awarded with the Emerita status to the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (Mexican National Registry of Researchers)[7]. She was part of a temporal exposition named "Knowledge without Borders" organized by The Slovenian Museum of Technology (Tehniški muzej Slovenije, TMS).[8]

Personal life

Marija Strojnik Scholl has three daughters which she raised herself after her husband passed away because of lateral sclerosis. Two of them became scientists themselves. In 2008, Strojnik Scholl was diagnosed with cancer which she has beaten several times with therapy.[2][3]

gollark: What webstuff?
gollark: Have you read the potatOS privacy policy, by any chance?
gollark: This is ridiculous, *somehow* the slow bit appears to be it doing a query using a column *with an index* to get *one row* which executes in *less time than the thing measures* if I run it manually.
gollark: Also, and this is very æ, it's still actually quite slow somehow.
gollark: But I can't tell if it's an actual bug or just because they have a slightly different dataset.

References
  1. Gass, Jeanette. "Marija Strojnik". The Optical Society. Retrieved 2018-10-15.
  2. "Marija Strojnik, the astrophysicist who sees beyond the solar system". STAznanost. Slovenian Press Agency. 2017-11-23. Retrieved 2019-04-24.
  3. Bandur, Simona (2018-05-23). "Znanstvenica, ki sledi svoji otroški želji po odkrivanju prostora" [A scientist who follows her childhood wish to explore space]. Delo (in Slovenian). Retrieved 2019-04-24.
  4. "Marija Strojnik". www.cio.mx. Retrieved 2020-06-13.
  5. "Marija Strojnik-Scholl". The International Society for Optics and Photonics. Retrieved 2019-04-24.
  6. "Marija Strojnik | Longdom Publishing SL". www.longdom.org. Retrieved 2020-05-25.
  7. Jiménez, Arturo Sánchez (2018-12-06). "Reconocen a 20 académicos como investigadores eméritos - Sociedad y Justicia - La Jornada". www.jornada.com.mx (in Spanish). Retrieved 2020-06-13.
  8. Žibret, Andreja (2018-03-01). "Štirinajst slovenskih znanstvenikov na ogled". www.delo.si (in Slovenian). Retrieved 2020-06-13.
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