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"News
OPTICA New Brand!
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!
Start of the NExt Generation of Tunable LASers for Optical Coherence Tomography (NETLAS) project
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/
OPSP2021 debunked
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:
Ramsgate outreach activity – Kent University. March 2022
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.
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”
We organised an international conference!
After more than a year of work, the student-led OPSP conference took place on April 13th and 14th. OPSP featured two days of online talks, networking and workshops with top researchers in optics and students from all around the world. The event was organised by the OSA Student Chapters at Kent (us) and at Surrey.
Applied Optics Group and OSA student chapter at Ramsgate Market – December 2019
On Saturday 5th October, members of the Applied Optics Group (AOG) teamed up with the SPS Outreach team and Discovery Planet to run a day-long event in Ramsgate. The team ran two market stalls: ‘Light Loops’ and ‘Light Botic.' The First stall was to demonstrate the properties and applications of light. The second was more focused on active research. The goal was to introduce members of the public to the state of the art, as well as get younger people to visualise themselves as scientists.
The first two experiments in the ‘Light Loops’ tent demonstrated how light travels through acrylic tubes and reflected down a stream of water being poured from a bucket. These demonstrations showed how light can be ‘bent’ using optical fibres, getting it to where we need it. This hopes to take the underpinning of fiber optics and deliver it in an accessible way.
Next, we simulate a laser based security system where participants are asked to retrieve a crystal placed in the middle of the maze without breaking the laser line. Finally in this tent, we show how contrast agents and light allow us to see the invisible using an ultraviolet torch to four hidden letters introducing the idea of using fluorescence in medical imaging and document security (as taught to our forensic science students).
Finding the remaining three letters to complete an anagram then took participants over to the ‘Light Botic’ tent. Here, the participant had to try their skills as a medic, hunting for the remaining letters inside a ‘patient’ using a flexible endoscope, and giving them an insight into how difficult medical diagnostics can be. This tent also showcased some of our latest work in miniaturised medical imaging devices for the lung.
We had lots of interest, from both adults and children, and we even had a surprise visit from the University Vice-Chancellor Prof Karen Cox who happened to be passing by! Market Traders and shoppers also told us they enjoyed the extra buzz and energy in the market.
Notes: The event was funded by the EPSRC REBOT (Robotic Endobronchial Optical Tomography project), a collaboration between the AOG and Imperial College London on combining optical coherence tomography with medical robotics for imaging the lung. SPS staff and students taking part were: Adrian Podoleanu, Manuel Marques, Mike Hughes, Vicky Mason, Hannah Tonry, Andy Thrapp, Adrian Uceda, Gianni Nteroli, and Julien Camard. We were also joined by two students currently visiting the Applied Optics Group from Germany (Melanie Wacker) and Mexico (Victor Rico Botero), as well as volunteers from Discovery Planet.
Some photos from the event: (credits: Discovery Planet/Portia Wilson Photography/Adrian Podoleanu)
Bushfields Science Fair
Our OSA Student Chapter just returned from the Bushfields Science Academy Science Fair in Huntingdon. Our student chapter members were invited by Guy Holmes with Laser 2000 to act as roaming judges. During the event about 100 students were able present to judges their STEM research projects. At the end of the event medals were awarded to the top three groups. Poster topics at the event included special relativity and time travel into the future, marine life in the salt rich conditions of the dead sea, lasers and laser science. The students were judged on a few criteria: quality of research, communication skills, responses to questions, and impact of research. The winning presentation was one which described a machine learning approach to determining what type of structural modifications to make to buildings to survive adverse weather conditions -- the presenter described an approach where structural parameters were fed into a database and images from severe weather events were then used as training sets. The machine learning could then be used to predict other factors that led to a structures collapse. Talking with other judges at the time, it is easy to forget the people you are talking to are only 12 years old. We were incredible impressed with the quality and time put into the presentations. We were happy to contribute posters celebrating the role of LGBT+ and Women in Science.
OSA Members in Munich, Santander and Barcelona
Our Optical Society student chapter chapter members have been busy presenting their research these last few weeks. Here are the highlights of their adventures.
Andy and Adrian – International School of Light and Sciences Technologies
Adrian Fernandez and Andy Thrapp just recently returned from a trip to Santander, Spain. Where both received complete grants to attend the 2019 International School of Light Sciences and Technologies. The event was held in the Palacio De Magdalena, an extraordinary site overlooking the Bay of Biscay. During their visit Andy and Adrian got to meet Donna Strickland the 2018 Nobel Prize Winner in Physics. Donna gave a talk about the topic of her PhD “Chirped Pulse Amplification.” Andy and Adrian got to see many other notable speakers such as Kishan Dholakia, Michael Hamblin and Robert Huber. We are both very grateful we had the chance to attend and look forward to keeping up with all the people we met.
Gianni – Oral Presentation at CLEO in Munich
Our OSA student chapter Vice President Gianni Nteroli was selected to deliver a talk on developments on using supercontinuum sources for high resolution multi-imaging instruments for biomedical applications. This project came about from a collaboration with NKT photonics. Research in this area is significant to develop imaging modalities which are capable of extracting both structural and functional information. Technologies like this will make way for the efficient monitoring of human tissue health. Imaging modalities such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) can be limited by noise degrading images, this can be compounded by sources introducing additional noise. Gianni discussed current challenges and research paths.
Adrian – Poster Presentation in Barcelona
Our OSA student chapter Secretary Adrian Fernandez last week presented a poster at the student led International Network of Students (IONS) conference in Barcelona. Adrian’s work focused on master slave Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) a technique which is not widely known in the field of OCT.
Andy – Oral Presentation in Barcelona
Andy Thrapp our OSA student chapter President delivered a talk titled “Automatic motion compensation in Structured Illumination Microscopy.” The talk was around his research in optical sectioning microscope, and how any motion during a three frame acquisition process can lead to artefacts. Andy discussed approaches to correct those artefacts.
Laser 2000 – Informational interview pilot visit
Our Optical Society (OSA) student chapter returned on the 2nd of March from a visit to Laser 2000. We are very grateful to our host Guy Holmes and his staff for dedicating so much of their time, showing us what optics distribution is like, and the importance of technical sales. This visit was the first ...continue reading "Laser 2000 – Informational interview pilot visit"
Our Optical Society (OSA) student chapter returned on the 2nd of March from a visit to Laser 2000. We are very grateful to our host Guy Holmes and his staff for dedicating so much of their time, showing us what optics distribution is like, and the importance of technical sales. This visit was the first visit of the informational interview program we as a chapter have decided to pilot.
This program is designed to smooth the transition from education to the workforce by bringing University of Kent optics and physical science students into contact with industry. Our chapter has started to reach out to optics and photonics companies across the UK to learn more about their businesses. We ask if they are willing to commit a few hours to a whole day with us, telling us about their business, showing us their facilities, and ask current employees questions. The benefit to the employer is getting access to a large group of highly skilled people nearing graduation. The benefit as individuals is a way to find companies aligned with our goals without the pressure of the interview setting.
This first visit was very well received by Laser 2000, according to the president Guy Holmes, we are the first chapter to reach out, and they are willing to meet other OSA chapters. As a result of this visit we are currently in the preliminary stages of setting up a joint outreach event. Feedback from people who went felt the visit was worthwhile and several new members have expressed a willingness to become involved with our planned outreach activities.
You can find more information about Laser 2000 in their own website: https://www.laser2000.co.uk/company/about-us.
If you want more information about the visit or about informational interviews, don't hesitate in contacting us with your details.