Photonics for a Better World

Guest blogger: Elizabeth Bernhardt, a physics research assistant in nonlinear optics at Washington State University, is  blogging on presentations at SPIE Optics + Photonics in San Diego, California, 28 August through 1 September. Dream big dreams, create amazing solutions: Paras Prasad offered inspiration in a talk on how nanomedicine can save lives Treating diseases in the human body can be incredibly difficult and certain cancers may even be inoperable. In the opening all-symposium plenary at SPIE Optics + Photonics 2016 , Paras Prasad, Executive Director of the Institute for Lasers, Photonics, and Biophotonics at the University at Buffalo, New York, told how he aims to bring treatment directly to the source of the disease, using light. Inspired early on by James Cameron's move  Fantastic Voyage (1966), Dr. Prasad imagined sending something tiny into the human blood stream to specifically target disease. He turned science...

We're sure he would have preferred a different path, but the contributions of Omid Kokabee to awareness of scientific responsibility are unmistakable. Last fall, he was named a recipient of the Andrei Sakharov Prize from the American Physical Society, and now the American Association for the Advancement of Science has announced Omid as the winner of the AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award for 2015. Kokabee, a laser physicist and a member of SPIE, was imprisoned in his native Iran as he attempted to return to his PhD studies at the University of Texas at Austin after a visit to his family in Tehran, in February 2011. He was accused of conspiring with enemies of Iran, and convicted in a trial in May 2012. He was not allowed to meet with his lawyer. Omid has continued his studies from prison, where he has written papers and submitted abstracts to professional meetings. Of course, he was not allowed to attend to present them. He's also been teaching -- English an...

 Roger Angel's prototype solar module based in a spaceframe to continuously track the sun. Image © REhnu Sitting in a conference room, listening to Roger Angel (REhnu and College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona) talk about how he is refocusing astronomical instrumentation to build highly efficient, cheaper solar cells, or watching Eva-Marie Sevick-Muraca (University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston) show the first-ever video of lymphatic flow inside a human being, or hearing Mario Paniccia (Intel) talk about the amazing advances in computing speed that are around the corner in silicon photonics … well, politics is perhaps not the first thing that comes to mind. But politics definitely does come to mind at some point, and most scientists recognize the importance of the relationship between the two spheres. Today’s endorsement by 68 Nobel Prize winners in science of the candidacy of President Barack Obama for re-election is one illustration. ...