Ulrike Fuchs is the Head of the Applications Department at asphericon. Her current position oversees all R&D activities as well as strategic product development.

She studied physics at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena from 1999 to 2004, majoring in optics. Subsequently, she pursued her PhD at Fraunhofer IOF and received her doctorate in 2009. Postdoctoral, she worked as a research associate at the IOF Micro-Optical Department and assistant lecturer at the Abbe School of Photonics.

She was elected a Fellow of the Society in 2020, and previously received the Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award in 2018. She is also a Senior Member.

Fuchs started her academic career in 2003 working on numerical simulations for ultrashort pulse propagation in complex optical system. Joining asphericon in 2010 as an optical designer shifted her research focus to interlinking manufacturing of aspherics and metrology with questions in optical design. She is continuously working on concepts that allow a prediction of system performance during optical design and tolerancing processes. Recently, great emphasis is put on transferring those ideas to freeform optics.