Photonics for a Better World

Gilles Freddy Feutmba is a Student Member of SPIE and the next community member to answer our 'Why Light?' series. The series is leading up to the second annual International Day of Light this 16 May, and asks members of the SPIE community to explain why they feel light is so important. Gilles is PhD Candidate at Ghent University working on the dense integration of ferro-electric Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) based silicon phase modulators for diverse applications ranging from LiDAR to displays. He is also Vice President of the university's SPIE Student Chapter. He is an active Member of SPIE, serving on the Membership and Communities Committee, as well as the Student Chapter Subcommittee and the Student and Early Career Professionals ad hoc Committee. He answers for us what light means to him and to the greater global community. Gilles Freddy Feutmba What about light inspires you? Everything about light fascinates me, from the fundamental physics to the beau...

Christopher Han SPIE’s #FacesofPhotonics social media campaign connects SPIE members in the global optics, photonics, and STEM communities. It serves to highlight similarities, celebrate differences, and foster a space where conversation and community can thrive. This week on #FacesofPhotonics we are sharing the story of Christopher Han, a junior at  Suzhou Singapore International School in China . Last year he presented his first academic paper at SPIE Optical Metrology in Munich. What an achievement! Check out his paper on the SPIE Digital Library . We hope you enjoy his story. Getting started In June 2016, I started an internship at a local optics company for a summer project where I would help to design an application. I worked with Master's students to program an app using C++, an app that could calculate the optimum transmission sphere when the data of a test surface was provided. The students were also having discussions regarding being innovative and doing res...

Jijo Ulahannan (SPIE Member Jijo Ulahannan , assistant professor at Government College Kasaragod in India, is among students at the biophotonics and imaging graduate summer school 7-13 June at the National University of Ireland [NUI] Galway. He filed this guest blog with a first-hand report.) The international Biophotonics and Imaging Graduate Summer School (BIGSS 2012) is underway in the beautiful coastal city of Galway focusing on two of the hottest topics in the field of biophotonics, namely optical coherence tomography (OCT) and photoacoustic imaging. About 30 graduate students and early career professionals are here for the event, which is organized by the NUI Galway Applied Optics group and chaired by Professor Martin Leahy who also leads the National Biophotonics Platform Ireland. Major sponsors are SPIE and Photonics4Life . The summer school brings the past, present and trends for the future of biophotonics and microscopic imaging techniques to aspiring young ...

Nicolaus Copernicus students explore optical fibers with kindergarten students as part of an SPIE Student Chapter outreach project. Members of the SPIE Student Chapter at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland went to a kindergarten to teach about physics, and came away with a powerful, life-changing idea for helping children with vision problems. Chapter member Danuta Bukowska tells the story: Like many other people with healthy vision, we had remained unaware of how difficult the lives of partially sighted people may be until we visited the Jan Brzechwa Kindergarten. One intention was to demonstrate special experiments in physics to the children. In the process, we saw how much work and practice on their part is essential for the partially sighted children among the class to cope in society. Deeply moved by this experience, we decided to take advantage of the resourcefulness and skills of young people who could put together an educational set of toys...

( 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...

(This is a guest post by Sabine Donner and Nadine Tinne, SPIE Student Chapter members who spent the end of May in Sweden at Biophotonics '11) Last week we wrote about our expectations going into Biophotonics '11 , and now that school has finished for the summer, we wanted to check back in to share a bit of our experience and encourage you all to find ways to get in touch with others in your own fields of research. The tiny island of Ven between Denmark and Sweden hosted 15 professors and 64 students from 18 countries who joined the Biophotonics ’11 Summer School. Seven days was hardly enough time to sufficiently discuss topics of biomedical optics, hear lectures and make friends! Dr. Katarina Svanberg (SPIE’s president) and the many other lecturers shared deep insights with us into their fields of research, including OCT, photodynamic therapy, and tumor imaging, and also motivated us to use photonics to fulfill unmet clinical needs. They emphasized the many ways that p...

Sabine (left) and Nadine (right at Hannover Airport en route to Ven Biophotonics ’11 is underway and two of SPIE’s Student Chapter members are participating in the summer school program. Sabine Donner and Nadine Tinne, both students pursuing their PhDs in biophotonics at the Laser Zentrum Hannovere e.V., are currently on the island of Ven in Sweden, learning about tissue optics, optical imaging and cell manipulation with lasers, among many other things. SPIE is proud to be a sponsor of this event, which brings together renowned lecturers from all over the world with promising students from this field. Nadine and Sabine are going to check back in at the end of the summer school session with additional reflections and more about what they learned, but in the meantime, here are some of their thoughts as they got ready to head to Sweden! “We are excited about getting in touch with other young scientists and expert lecturers and having the chance to discuss our work with them – ho...