Photonics for a Better World

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS: Ebongue smiles as she overcomes  her fear of heights  at the top of the Umeda Sky Building in Osaka, Japan Bonjour ! Meet Christiane Ebongue, graduate student at Delaware State University (DSU).  Christiane is working on a master's degree in applied optics with a goal of achieving a PhD in Physics. When she is not spending time in the lab  —   something she says she loves so much, she would even want to be there on her birthday!  —  she enjoys her role as president of her university's SPIE Student Chapter. Ebongue moved to the United States from Cameroon for college, although she only spoke French at the time. Learning to speak a new language while learning a new field of science was intimidating, she says, but this feat just speaks to how tenacious of a person Ebongue is. Another example of this steadfast dedication and passion lies in her photonics advocacy work. After defending her thesis in the morning, Ebongue hopped...

PHOTONICS-FOCUSED PAIR: Choi and   Kovach work side-by-side in the  Armani Research Lab Technical conferences such as SPIE Photonics West are known for giving students the opportunity to present their research, perfect their presentation and networking skills, and actively engage with other researchers in a setting outside of their university lab. SPIE Fellow and  University of Southern California Professor Andrea Armani, a   strong advocate of student professional  development , brings a group from her lab to SPIE Photonics West each year to present their latest work. You can follow along with the Armani Research Lab and their journey to the conference via Armani's Twitter feed . Hyungwoo Choi, Rene Zeto, Dongyu Chen, and Andre Kovach will accompany Professor Armani to Photonics West for a series of six presentations. The list of talks can be found here . Choi attended SPIE Photonics West last year as an author and was pleasantly surprised by...

SPIE Women in Optics program has been enhancing and promoting the personal and professional growth of women in STEM since 1998. With its proactive focus on diversity, inclusivity, gender equity, SPIE leverages its extensive networks as well as its funding programs to support professionals and students alike. Two Society grant programs, currently open for application, offer critical opportunities to SPIE Members, their communities, and their families. The SPIE Women in Optics Activity Grant Networking lunches and diversity coffee-and-cake meetups; hosting high-profile visiting speakers; recruiting and building groups of students interested in optics-focused careers; running STEM-engagement workshops aimed at young girls; and creating symposiums at which students interact with women professionals from industry and academia: these are just a few of the myriad activities that recipients of the SPIE Women in Optics Activity Grant have implemented around the world. The program, now en...

Mandy Malabi SPIE's #FacesofPhotonics is sharing the story of Rudzani (Mandy) Malabi. Rudzani is a biophotonics research student in the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) National Laser Centre. She is from Thohoyandou, a town in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Originally, Rudzani studied virology and discovered her interest in optics and photonics during her doctoral degree. She has always been an active member of the CSIR SPIE Student Chapter, and is currently vice president. Enjoy her interview! 1. Tell us about when you first became interested in optics and photonics. I first heard of optics and photonics when I applied to do my doctoral degree at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). I was fascinated by how light interacts with biological materials. I come from a virology background, but wanted to know more about light science. What better way to learn than actually doing a research project that involves optics and ph...

Raphael Yuste discusses work in brain mapping in a new video interview with SPIE. Rafael Yuste and his research group at Columbia University are trying to image the neural circuits of the brain in hopes of gaining a better understanding of how the brain functions. However, said Yuste in a recent tour and video interview of his lab with SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics , “The methods in neuroscience have not been there yet.” Yuste is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Circuits at Columbia. He and David Boas (director of the optics division of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School) chair the new Brain applications track at SPIE Photonics West 2017 in San Francisco, running 28 January through 2 February. Using novel optical techniques such as two-photon and nonlinear microscopy, Yuste’s lab is trying t...

( Michelle Xu is a PhD-graduate from the University of Toronto, where she worked to engineer diagnostic hand-held devices using nano-grating surface plasmon sensors and nano-pillar photonics crystal sensors to enable the early detection of cancer. Knowing that her device could identify high-risk individuals and help prevent disease, she was motivated to commercialize her research. To support her efforts, Newport and SPIE sponsored her attendance at the Biomedical Engineering Entrepreneurship Acadamy (BMEA) held at the University of California, Davis earlier this month. Below are her reflections on the experience. Her colleague Chang Won will be writing about his experience at the academy next week!) The number one lesson I learned at the BMEA was that in academia, we start by solving a problem and then search for needs; in business planning, we start with a need, and then solve the problem. This issue of course raises the question, “Are technologies validated differently in aca...

Conference chairs have offered more suggestions on presentations to hear at SPIE Photonics West next week. The technologies and applications in the latest recommendations differ in many ways, but all share one important commonality: they all demonstrate how versatile and powerful photonics is when it comes to gathering information about matter, in environments as disparate as inside the human body and in space. Scientists and engineers from top space organizations in Europe, Canada, and the United States will share the stage in a Tuesday evening panel discussion on MEMS for space applications . They’ll explore the advantages, challenges, and possibilities -- with reference no doubt to a joint session earlier in the day among three MOEMS-MEMS conferences with papers on possible space applications in telescopes, gyros, spectrometers, and other devices. Among papers on research in spectroscopy are a presentation in the conference on Optical Biopsy exploring Stokes shift spectroscopy ...

Are you headed for SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco later this month? Have you sorted out which papers you want to hear -- from among the 4,127 on the program? If you’d like a much shorter list to consider, here are some ideas we collected from conference chairs and others who have studied the program. While these technologies cover the full range of the four-symposium event, they are representative of all 4,000 papers in their focus on solving the challenges facing the world: They offer promise for detecting cancer in time to enable a cure, restoring vision, detecting clandestine nuclear weapons, enhancing automobile safety, improving both energy efficiency and human health with solid-state lighting, and much more. BiOS 7885-23 “OCT-guided femtosecond laser system for cataract surgery,” Daniel Palanker (Stanford Univ. School of Medicine), et al. A new technique using a femtosecond laser to break up damaged lenses before removal can make cataract surgery easier and more pr...

As pervasive and vital as photonics technologies are in industry, healthcare, communications, entertainment, and elsewhere in modern life, the term “photonics” is not exactly a household word. More to the point, it is not a term that is immediately understood in many houses of government, where decisions are made about which research, innovation, and education programs to fund and how richly to fund them. Yet, programs benefit more when policy makers and budget writers understand the importance of the technologies and the scope of the industry. Information about the size of the photonics industry and the influence of photonics science, in the form of comprehensive national and regional reports, has been a powerful tool for helping to communicate with governments about the importance of photonics funding. In the past few years, reports have surveyed industry activity, market trends, and opportunities regionally in the European Union and in Asia, while additional reports focus on...

Rox Anderson, who for many years has partnered with Jim Fujimoto of MIT as Co-Chair of the Biomedical Optics Symposium at SPIE Photonics West , won’t be in San Francisco for the event later this month. Instead, this year Rox will be in Vietnam, putting to good use his teaching skills as well as laser medicine technology developed with the contributions of SPIE members and others. Working as the Vascular Anomalies Center, Rox and other volunteers have opened a free clinic in Vietnam. There, babies receive laser treatments for treatment of vascular birth defects -- disfiguring pigmented lesions. By eliminating this source of physical dysfunction, social stigma, and isolation, the lives of these children have been dramatically changed. The center has treated more than 500 children since 2009. In past years Rox has been able to schedule his job at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard School of Medicine and his work at the VAC so that he...