Roland Winston, pioneer in solar energy, engineering and physics, 1936–2025

Roland Winston, SB’56, SM’57, PhD’63—a pioneer in solar energy, engineering, and physics—died Feb. 8 at his home in California. He was 88.

Winston was a University of Chicago professor in the Department of Physics from 1965 to 2003, serving as the department chair from 1989 to 1995, as well as a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute. In 2003, he helped establish the University of California, Merced, where he retired as Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

Winston is considered to have founded the field of non-imaging optics, whose principles shape many technologies today. He published hundreds of articles in scientific journals, co-wrote several books, and held more than 50 patents. 

In the 1970s, he created the “Winston cone,” an innovative design to collect light more efficiently. Winston cones underlie many solar energy installations today, but they have also mapped the stars, the Earth’s climate, and the fundamental makeup of the universe. They have been designed and carried high aboard mountains, into the Earth’s atmosphere aboard balloons, and headed out to space itself. 

“Roland—a remarkably thoughtful and creative scientist and a kind and generous colleague—invented the field of non-imaging optics to solve a problem he encountered while constructing a detector for a particle physics experiment,” said Edward Blucher, UChicago Professor in the Physics Department and Director of the Enrico Fermi Institute. “His insight revolutionized light collection for both solar energy and for numerous experiments in physics and astronomy.”

Solar energy foundations

More than 50 years ago, as a junior faculty member in the University of Chicago Physics Department, Winston published a 1966 paper introducing a new field he called non-imaging optics, describing the compound parabolic solar concentrator, a highly efficient device that collects and concentrates light. He also introduced “Winston Cones,” non-imaging light collectors that by their design maximize the amount of light that can be focused from large areas into smaller photodetectors or photomultipliers.

Much of the solar-concentrating research that has followed has been based on these landmark papers.

The concepts developed and the devices Winston invented formed the core of solar technology, which carries the promise of making solar energy a viable energy source for society. Non-imaging solar collectors—once thought to be impossible—don’t need to track the sun and can function well under cloudy or hazy skies. They revolutionized solar energy use by providing the widest possible acceptance angles. They offer higher solar concentrations in smaller cells and generate higher temperatures with less thermal loss. They improve the reliability and efficiency of the solar cells in concentrated photovoltaics and improve heat transfer in concentrated solar thermal. They have even been used for water desalinization.

International experts continue to highlight the importance of Winston’s breakthrough. Professor Aldo Steinfeld of ETH Zurich university cited Winston’s work when he was asked by his campus’s president to present an example of basic research that led to a highly practical application comparable to Albert Einstein’s photoelectric effect that led to the development of photovoltaics.

On a cold but sunny February day in 1988, Winston and his team went to the rooftop of a University of Chicago building and used a new mirror-based technique to set a record for concentration of solar energy—concentrating sunlight to more than 60,000 times its normal intensity.

Winston’s work also formed the foundation of many experiments to advance the field. They have been used by scientists all around the world to track cosmic rays, map the sky in different wavelengths of light, and to measure the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Winston Cones were used in an experiment that detected mass in neutrinos and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015 and are aboard the James Webb Space Telescope, currently taking extraordinarily detailed images of space.

A year after the invention of the Winston cone, scientists—Winston among them—discovered that the compound eyes of the horseshoe crab are designed exactly the same way.

“As we mourn his loss, we also celebrate his extraordinary legacy, which will continue to guide and inspire future generations,” UC Merced Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz said. 

Scholar, mentor, social entrepreneur

Winston was born Feb. 12, 1936, in Moscow, USSR, the son of a Russian chemical engineer and an American engineer who was helping the Soviets design towns and build an industrial base. The family evacuated the Soviet Union in 1943 during World War II, as the German military got within artillery range.

He attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York City for two years, earning early entrance to Shimer College in Illinois before transferring to the University of Chicago, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a PhD.

Winston studied under Prof. Yoichiro Nambu, who shared the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics for explaining why matter is much more common in the cosmos than antimatter. His most influential mentor, he later said, however, was a different Nobel Laureate—Prof. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, whose comment about the mathematics of optics inspired Winston to dig into optimizing light collection.

After a short stint as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Winston returned to the University of Chicago. He conducted research at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, and at Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, both in the Chicago area. He was also a visiting professor at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel.

Besides solar energy, Winston also researched high-energy and particle physics and astrophysics. 

“Roland was very much focused on the particle physics of the ‘weak magnetism’ of the hyperon decays. He performed a series of seminal experiments at Argonne and Fermilab,” said UChicago Physics Professor Yau W. Wah, who first met Winston when Wah was a Yale graduate student working on the Fermilab E497 experiment, designed to measure charged hyperon fluxes, polarization, and magnetic moments. Wah and Winston went on to collaborate on several experiments at the University of Chicago and Enrico Fermi Institute.

“Roland was a great mentor for generations of graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members,” added Wah. “And his influence went beyond research—he introduced me to opera and gave me a ticket to The Marriage of Figaro at the Chicago Civic Opera House.”

Winston joined UC Merced in 2003 as one of the original eight founding faculty members. Over his nearly 20 years at UC Merced, he guided many undergraduate and graduate students, and when he retired in 2022 at the age of 86, his work didn’t stop. He founded Winston Cone Optics, a company dedicated to his research in solar technologies and to making solar energy more efficient and less expensive so it could be available to more people. He hired several people he had worked with through UC Solar, including graduate students and his administrative assistant, Robyn Lukens.

Lukens cited Winston’s kindness, pointing out that Winston and his wife, Pat, paid Lukens’ tuition so she could attain her associate’s degree in accounting at Merced College. As a single mother, Lukens said she was touched and truly grateful.

Winston was a fellow with the American Physical Society, the American Optical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Solar Energy Society, the International Solar Energy Society, and SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics.

He was a Guggenheim Fellow, won the Joseph Fraunhofer Award for “significant accomplishments in optical engineering” from the Optical Society of America, and was elected as a U.S. delegate to the International Solar Energy Society. Winston was also awarded the Franklin Institute C. Raymond Kraus Gold Medal; the Farrington Daniels Award of the International Solar Energy Society; the University of Chicago’s Alumni Award for Professional Achievement; and UC Merced’s first Chancellor’s Award, which included the Professor Roland Winston Endowed Scholarship, available to an entering first-year student with a declared major in physics or engineering who demonstrates financial need and/or is a DREAM Act student.

Winston is survived by his sons John and Joe, half-brothers Eugene and Vanya Loroch, grandsons Milo and Beckett Winston, and step-grandchildren Zoe and Alex Leuba. He is predeceased by his wife, Patricia, and son Gregory. 

—Adapted from the obituary originally published by UC Merced.