Carney Named Chair of SBU Department of Mechanical Engineering

P. Scott Carney has been named chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University, effective September 1, 2025. He will be a visiting professor from July 1 until August 31.

An applied theorist, Carney joined the University of Rochester as a professor of optics in 2017, and served for four years as the director of The Institute of Optics, an academic department in the Hajim School of Engineering.

He has a strong record of research achievements in theoretical applied physics and optical engineering with impact in imaging, metrology and materials.

From 2001 until 2017, Carney was a member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and held a simultaneous appointment at The Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. At Urbana-Champaign, he also served as interim founding director of the Innovation, Leadership, and Engineering Entrepreneurship degree program.

Active in the optics community, he also served as chief technology officer at Optica, a scientific nonprofit based in Washington DC, where he led the government affairs team. He has chaired and co-chaired several international conferences and served as editor-in-chief for the Journal of the Optical Society of America for six years.

An entrepreneur, Carney co-founded Diagnostic Photonics, Inc. to bring to market a surgical microscope with the initial focus being margin assessment in breast cancer, and he served as a board member and chief scientific officer. Diagnostic Photonics is a medtech company commercializing a handheld, high-resolution imaging system for cancer surgery.

His major career accomplishments include modeling of tip-sample interactions in near-field microscopy and the solution of related inverse problems; solution of the inverse problem for optical coherence tomography (OCT) and the subsequent invention of interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy (ISAM); and the development of synthetic optical holography (SOH).

Andrew Singer, dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said, "Professor Carney will bring his deep scholarship and entrepreneurial spirit to this role as chair. We have a strong mechanical engineering program and are looking forward to its continued growth in impact and scholarship under his leadership."

Carney's many honors include a Fulbright Fellow, a NSF Career Award, and the William F. Meggers Award from the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. Carney is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, as well as a fellow of Optica. He has also been recognized with numerous awards for teaching excellence. Carney has authored and presented more than 130 peer-reviewed technical papers, has given over 100 invited talks, and holds 18 patents in applied physics and optics.

He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1994 and a doctorate in physics from the University of Rochester in 1999.

Carney follows interim chair Jon Longtin, professor of Mechanical Engineering.