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.
Adrian is a pioneering researcher who helped advance greatly the field of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). The University of Kent has benefited for many years from Adrian’s dedication and enthusiasm and the world-leading quality of his research and its application.
Beyond the opportunity to honour Adrian and his long successful career, this event will also allow the current research students to attend high-quality presentations, present their current work and network with a swathe of high-calibre researchers that this has already attracted.
Since 2005 Adrian has led the Applied Optics Group in the University of Kent (and continues to do so), developing OCT both as a methodology and with applications across a wide range of fields from clinical practice to forensic sciences. He has supervised (and continues to do so) of more than 50 postgraduate and visiting researchers during his career at Kent, many of whom have gone on to lead in their fields.
Adrian's leadership in (and of) the community has been widely recognised through editorships, high profile lectures and awards including an ERC Advanced Grant, 2010-2015, the order Coroana Romaniei (Order of the Crown), Royal House of Romania, 2017 and Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, 2015. He is a Fellow of IOP, Optica and SPIE, a Board member of 5 journals and has been in more than 70 conference organisation committees, out of which chaired or cochaired 17, He has been one of the 8 elected Vice-Presidents of the International Commission of Optics (ICO), 2017-2020 and Chair of the Committee awarding IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics, 2017 – 2021. Since 2021, he is an associate secretary of the ICO.
His work combining OCT, scanning laser ophthalmoscopy and adaptive optics for the retina has led to commercial collaborations to produce licensed products that are estimated to have benefited around 5 million patients worldwide. More recently he has pioneered a new processing paradigm for spectral domain optical coherence tomography which allows imaging with unprecedented speed, with direct clinical applications.
Adrian's prolific research efforts have made him the author with the highest number of publications across the University for the last 9 years running (according to SciVal) and he is also the UK author with the highest number of OCT outputs, as well as more than £15m in grants won (to date) during his career at Kent. Adrian was Lead Guest Editor of a special feature in Biomedical Optics Express, a leading gold open access journal of Optica, to celebrate 20 years from the invention of the OCT/SLO which firmly put the University of Kent on the map of vision and ophthalmic instruments research.
Adrian has also led a series of European funded training networks which bring academics and industry together in the training Early Career Researchers. These training networks highlight his continued passion for training, mentoring, and developing the careers of young researchers, indeed some of his former students and younger collaborators have themselves established international research groups. The time and dedication with which he undertakes such training and mentoring are an example to the community.
As members of the Applied Optics Group, we look forward to welcoming in May a number of world leading researchers and also giving Adrian an opportunity to be reunited with many of his alumni who benefited not only from his undoubted research excellence but also from his leadership and training to go on and be high achievers in the field of Optical Coherence Tomography and Photonics in general.
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