Professor Nugent is a distinguished optical physicist who has been singularly creative from the earliest age. Some of his achievements are: I. Penumbra! imaging of hot plasma neutrons, in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. 2. Lobster-Eye X-ray imaging yielding an all-sky x-ray telescope for a NASA collaboration. 3. Phase determination in x-ray optics, which he solved by extracting phase from intensity measurements on two planes, is of importance to synchrotron radiation imaging. His other work involves contributions to x-ray holography, coherence measurement and near field optics. Much of Nugent's work has been devoted to problems of neutron and x-ray optics for which refractive materials are not available.