Montana State doctoral student wins Women in Optics scholarship

BOZEMAN - Morgan Hasenmyer, a doctoral student at Montana State University, is one of five women worldwide to be awarded a 2026 Women in Optics Scholarship from SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, for her potential contributions to the field. The one-year scholarship is for $10,000.

"I'm very grateful for this support and the investment in my education," said Hasenmyer, who this spring successfully defended her master's dissertation at MSU in optics and photonics. She is now a doctoral student in the Optical Remote Sensor Laboratory under the direction of Joseph Shaw in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering, who also serves as the director of the Optical Technology Center, or OpTeC.

As a field of scientific inquiry, optics and photonics is the science and engineering of light, including how it is generated, transmitted, manipulated, detected and utilized. MSU is considered a leader in this field due to its longstanding research programs, interdisciplinary education and close partnerships and formative ties with one of the nation's most concentrated optics-industry clusters.

"This really highlights Morgan's commitment to the community of optics and photonics, and it highlights her going beyond just being a student in the field," said Shaw, who is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering. "In other words, it shows she's a leader, which is one of the key things that the committee looks for in selecting scholarship winners." 

Hasenmyer, whose hometown is Mansfield, Texas, earned a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Oklahoma Christian University. Her area of research is the remote sensing of aerosols in the atmosphere using a camera capable of capturing the entire sky dome to gather data related to particles in the air from fires. Aerosol concentrations are how scientists measure air quality.

Current monitoring techniques generally rely on ground-based sensors, which are sensitive to clouds and are spatially limited, or satellites that might pass overhead a few times each month. Hasenmyer uses polarization technologies to provide measurements every minute without the mechanical scanning required by existing ground-based sensors, capturing a more complete picture of aerosol conditions brought about by smoke plumes. This polarization technology can also determine whether clouds comprise liquid, ice or a combination of the two - information that administrators at airports need to know to make informed de-icing decisions that affect flight safety and operations.

Hasenmyer describes polarization as "the orientation of the oscillation of the electric field as a wave that travels through space," and compares it to the direction that the light is moving or the orientation of the light. As the light interacts with gas molecules, aerosols and cloud particles in the atmosphere, it changes polarization states. The scattering by aerosols affects both the amount of light that is polarized and the direction of that polarization. Different aerosol particles produce different polarization signatures depending on their shape, size and angle relative to the sun.

Her work, which is part of a larger research project, is funded by a portion of a five-year, $20 million SMART FireS EPSCoR grant from the National Science Foundation. The SMART FireS project - short for Sensors, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time Fire Science - includes more than 120 faculty, graduate students and undergraduates from nine Montana institutions including MSU, University of Montana, Dawson Community College, Flathead Valley Community College, Fort Peck Community College, Little Big Horn College, Montana Tech, MSU Billings and Salish Kootenai College. SMART FireS is led by MSU's Robert Walker, head of the Department Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Letters and Science, with Shaw and UM professors Lu Hu and Libby Metcalf.

Researchers in the Optical Remote Sensor Laboratory, including Hasenmyer, are among the first to implement polarization into all-sky imaging. Collectively, they are testing the instrument to ensure it works correctly before making it deployable for public use. She said once the researchers clear that threshold, it might become practical to deploy multiple instruments operating continuously to monitor a wider area of coverage.

"Being able to have that system be replicable means we could have more than one system continuously providing important data [about a fire]," she said. "You could leave [the instruments] outside and they would be able to run without somebody there," suggesting that multiple deployed units could operate autonomously, providing ongoing fire detection and characterization across different locations without constant human presence at each site. This would provide a wider range of fire detection and characterization, she said, compared to traditional methods that require people to be physically present at ground level for chemical sampling.

"The instrument's portability means you could bring it to field locations and burn sites and get scientific-grade data from a reasonable distance away," she said.

Hasenmyer also serves as vice president of the Optics and Photonics Society at MSU, which was recently named first runner up for the SPIE 2026 Presidential Award for Outstanding Student Chapter.

"Morgan is working toward making a difference in the betterment of society, as opposed to just being head-down focused on the purely technical aspects of the work," Shaw said. "She's committed to doing what needs to be done and also doing what can be done to make the project better and to make better futures for other students, as well."

SPIE was founded in 1955 and to date has distributed nearly $8 million in scholarships.