In career spanning nearly a half-century and filled with pioneering work that has helped expand the horizons of astronomy and optics, Regents Professor Roger Angel of The University of Arizona has been named one of 16 inductees this year in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Angel, who is on the faculty of the Colleges of Science and Optical Sciences, has developed concepts for imaging and searching for Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars, explored innovative ways to cool our warming planet, and invented revolutionary methods for manufacturing large-scale optics for telescopes.

He perhaps is best known for creating ways to make extremely large, parabolic glass mirrors with a lightweight, strong honeycomb structure. It has become the main operation at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the Steward Observatory, which produces spin-casted parabolic mirrors of to 8.4 meters in diameter — the world’s largest optics of their kind.