On Saturday, March 14th, several members of the Applied Optics Group and of the OSA student chapter took on the challenge of organising and hosting an outreach event with the support of the School of Physical Sciences at the local city museum, the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge.
Titled "Light up your life - Day of Discovery", this event focused on raising awareness of the importance of Optics and Photonics among the general public, especially since this year has been proclaimed by the United Nations as the International Year of Light (IYL). We had about 100-200 people attending throughout the day, mostly families with children, which made it that more challenging as the way the content was presented had to be changed on-the-fly!
The event couldn't have gone forward without the organisation (and recruiting) from our School's outreach officer, Dr Vicky Mason, to whom we are grateful. She also provided an additional interactive module in the form of a thermal imaging camera (which yielded some interesting thermal "selfies" such as the one below).
Finally, our thanks to all of our colleagues who kindly volunteered to be there on a Saturday: Prof Adrian Podoleanu, Dr Adrian Bradu, Dr Sylvain Rivet, Christopher Costa, Catherine Chin, Manuel Marques, Michaël Maria and Radu Stancu.