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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.

...continue reading "Professor Adrian Podoleanu Career Celebration, Canterbury 26-27 May 2022"

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!

Photo of two Optica Chapter members holding the new Chapter flag
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

https://netlas.aogkent.uk/blog/

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”