Between the activities of the OPTICA Student Chapter, the company visits its listed. Hence, is always good to make a visit to our closest company in Kent, CAIRN Research.
The company chairman, Martin Thomas, previously visited the AOG labs, and following our conversation we initiated a visit to his company.
In the photo, from left to right: Irene Lamoso, Rasmus, Manuel Marques, Alejandro Martinez, Hal Darrington, Rene Riha, Marie Kluf, Adrian Fernandez, Esteban , Gopika Venugopal, Julien Camard and the company director Martin
Martin (green t-shirt in the photo) guided the group into his labs, telling us how the company was settled in Kent and how they adapt to the necessities of the industry. Seems like it was a great adventure!
Jez Graham, CEO of Cairn Research, showed us some of the products that they developed for their customers. Completely customized products for their customers.
We really had a great experience during the visits, fascinating tools are the ones that they have. We wish them all prosperity and success in the following years! Hope that we can collaborate more in the future, and see more of our PhD Students in your company!
This Student Chapter together with the Applied Optics Group at the University of Kent has initiated a poster session for the International Day of Light. Different students have prepared posters with little concepts on light and its deep application, all related to their research topics.
In the photo, from left to right: Manuel Marques, Marie Kluf, Julien Camard, Adrian Fernandez, Irene Lamoso, Adrian Podoleanu, Rasmus, Esteban Andres Proano, Alejandro Martinez, Rene Riha, Gopika Venugopal and Ramona Cernat. Posted at the entrance of School of Physical Sciences
If you want to zoom in and have a close look on the posters! Please have it attached just below:
With this initiative, the Chapter administration wanted to let the student chapter known to the students at the University of Kent. They are more than welcome to visit us and join our activities.
The last Thursday 21st April 2022, Prof Marinko visited the AOG and gave a talk about his recent developments in the OCT field with a special interest in how to take advantage of AI with OCT-A. Check below the abstract of the talk.
Visit Prof. Marinko, photo in Ingram. From left to right: Rasmus Eilkaer, Julien Camard (VP Optica Chapter), Rene Riha, Adrian Fernandez (Member Optica Chapter), Dr George Dobre, Alejandro Martinez (P Optica Chapter), Prof Adrian Podoleanu, Esteban Proano, Prof Marinko, Dr Manuel Marques, Irene Rodriguez, Giannis Nteroli (Member Optica Chapter), Gopika Venugopal (Member Optica Chapter), Dr Adrian Bradu
Title: OCT Angiography and AI for Diabetic Retinopathy
Abstract: Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of vision loss in working age adults. The pathological changes to the retina, the light sensitive tissue at the back of the eye, due to DR can be imaged with optical coherence tomography (OCT), and the microvasculature visualized with OCT Angiography (OCTA). Artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyse the OCT intensity and OCTA flow contrast image data may assist with the classification of DR, and has potential to identify early changes that may be predictive of disease severity.
Bio: Prof Marinko Sarunic's research investigates optical imaging devices for biomedical applications. Prof. Sarunic completed undergraduate studies at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC, Canada) and a doctoral degree at Duke University (Durham, NC, USA). The main research focus is on optical coherence tomography (OCT), a non-invasive, three-dimensional, micrometer-resolution imaging technique using the interference of light. Prof. Sarunic's group designs and constructs OCT imaging systems primarily for studies in ophthalmology and vision science. In addition to OCT, their work covers various techniques for structural and functional optical imaging and analysis.
Like everything in the last years, most of the things are delayed. For that reason, we've created the abnormal calendar, a calendar that doesn't start in January, it starts in February! Anyway, this has been a funny work done with all members of the Kent Optica Society members, with collaboration of most AOG members.
Calendars!!
If you want to have a copy, go ahead and print the following pdf!
We're delighted to announce that an event will take place in Canterbury, UK, on Thursday 26 (afternoon) and Friday 27 May (all day), to celebrate our colleague Prof Adrian Podoleanu's career achievements to date. http://cc22.aogkent.uk/ There will be a few dozen in-person participants to the event, which will take place on the University of Kent campus, while many others, located across various continents, will join online. For those coming here there will be a gala dinner on Friday as well.While we want to emphasize that Adrian is not about to retire any time soon, it will be nice to mark several decades for him at the University of Kent, driving forward the field of OCT.
The new Chapter flag is here! The OSA becomes Optica Worldwide as we look back on a successful year marked by the organisation of the international Optics and Photonics for Scientific Progress conference. We now look forward to organising more optics-related activities in this year!
In the photo, from left to right: Sacha Grelet in the computer, Adrian Fernandez and Alejandro Martinez
Starting in June 2020, new people from all around Europe started their PhD on this wonderful project. Some of them started at the University of Kent, joining the Kent Optica Chapter, Alejandro Martinez Jimenez, and Gopika Venugopal, Sacha Grelet.
NETLAS will train 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESR)s at the sites of 14 partners in Europe (as listed on the Tabs of Beneficiaries and Associated Partners at the top of the page).
NETLAS is supported by Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission, with 4.3 million Euros, to create an interdisciplinary and intersectoral European Training Network (ETN). This will provide state-of-the-art research training in the design and build of the next generation of tunable optical sources for optical coherence tomography (OCT) applied to medical imaging and non-destructive testing (NDT). NETLAS will foster training and education of young researchers in a cutting-edge and rapidly expanding hot topic, while developing 12 novel Photonics technologies and their translation into several distinct areas of application. The training and research programme is born out of a strong and clear need to respond to the challenges of providing faster, deeper, higher resolution imaging and more versatile investigation with a smaller footprint (portable), at a low enough cost to stimulate wide adoption.
NETLAS has its own website which you can visit and know what are the latest news from the researchers involved. Visit the website [link]. Moreover, a two-month newsletter is published with summary on the news
On Thursday 3rd March 2022, two Chapter members, Julien Camard and Adrian Fernandez-Uceda, shared their experience in organizing OPSP2021 [link] at the Netlas Winter School at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). From obtaining funding to getting feedback from attendees, they tried to go through all the aspects of running such an event, aiming to demonstrate that it only takes motivation, organisation and a bit of academic support!
Despite being the last talk of the day at a very interesting Winter School, they managed to keep the audience awake and hopefully made the audience want to organize their own event in the near future.
The slides are freely available at the following link:
Kent and Discovery Planet open innovative community space in Ramsgate
On 10 March, the innovative and welcoming community space was opened, where regular interactive workshops delivered by research scientists from Kent will take place over the coming years. The space opening was timed to coincide with British Science Week 2022 (11-20 March), a ten-day celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths.
The hands-on workshops for school children and members of the community launched with a free three-day event called Light Fantastic, which explores the amazing properties of light. The Light Fantastic sessions were delivered by Kent’s Applied Optics Group (Dr Adrian Bradu, Dr. George Dobre, Dr. Mike Hughes, Dr. Manuel Marques, NETLAS PhD Students) Alejandro Martinez Jimenez and Gopika Venugopal and touched on the fact that light science has many medical applications, such as enabling an examination of people’s eyes. There were 500 participants over the three days, including 242 students between the ages of 8-14 from nine schools and over 100 members of the public.
Photo credit: Pete Bateson
Photo credit: Pete Bateson
Photo credit: Pete Bateson. In the photo Manuel Marques previous President of the Kent Optics Chapter
Alejandro Martinez, President of Optica Chapter at Kent said:
"Building a periscope and later enjoying a light maze using mirrors and beam splitters, this activity allows the children to have some fun and learn science! In my opinion I think this kind of outreach events are important during our PhD. At first, we need to help with the organization and design the event. This gives us a perspective in how we should organize our events, where to make publicity and who to contact. Once the event is ongoing we must talk in a non-technical environment, speak in-person to a general audience about our research, which is always a step more to express ourselves. All these skills together are quite valuable for the PhD students and also is important keep connection with the society”
