Introduction to Adaptive Optics and Optical Imaging

This is a graduate-level course about why real optical images never look as sharp as theory predicts, and what you can do to fix that, turbulence, tissue, and lens aberrations all distort the wavefront, and adaptive optics is the toolkit for measuring and correcting those distortions in hardware or in post-processing. You will work through Fourier optics from the ground up (diffraction, PSFs, transfer functions) before getting into wavefront sensing, phase conjugation, and the transmission-matrix approach used in modern biomedical imaging. Most of the grade comes from a single project, so expect to pick a topic, read recent literature, and present your own analysis rather than grind problem sets.