Barcelona and the Blog

Our stay in Barcelona ended with late afternoon coffee and pastries enjoyed with a few of the IONS 5 organizers: Giorgio Volpe, Lars Neumann and Armand Niederberger. Congratulations to these IONS 5 organizers, and to their colleague and co-organizer Osamu Takayama, for doing a wonderful job.

Standing here with Armand Niederberger

A glimpse of IONS-5 Participants at Work

A very early morning taxi ride took us to the airport where we headed to Munich for our flight to Dulles airport in Washington DC. My wife Bobbi, who had been a very welcome and gracious travel companion for the trip, headed back home to northern California, while I hopped a cab and headed into Washington for three days of meetings.

My first meeting while in DC was on Capital Hill, where I met with US Congressman Rush Holt and presented him with the Advocate of Optics award for 2008. Congressman Holt is one of three members of congress with a Doctorate in Physics. He has been instrumental in helping to raise awareness of the key role that optics and photonics has played in telecommunications, biomedicine, solar energy, solid-state lighting and homeland security. Congressman Holt was particularly interested in the increases in efficiency that are possible using the next generation of photo-voltaic optical materials as well as the major impact potential of solid-state LED lighting in reducing energy consumption. These two technologies alone could reduce our fossil fuel usage and overall energy consumption by as much as 40 %. Educating our government officials of this potential is one of my major goals this year as OSA president. OSA/SPIE Congressional Fellow Rob Saunders, who works in his office, joined us for the presentation of the award.

Baer, Holt, and Saunders

We returned to OSA headquarters for meetings with staff and then I headed to a reception at the US National Archives near the White House. My visit there was hosted by the Network and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) arm of the US federal government. NITRD is a trans-agency coordinating committee developing strategy for the next generation internet and networking technologies. Thirteen of the major government funding agencies attended the meeting, including: the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, NASA, NIST, NIH, and NSF. My presentation stressed the IT infrastructure components that were critical in order to publish, peer review, archive and visualize very large data sets, published along with scientific manuscripts. One of the attendees at the meeting, Bob Kahn, co-inventor of the TCP-IP protocol for the internet, along with Vint Cerf, a fellow member of the VCAT committee of NIST. Both are considered to be the founding fathers of the internet.

Before the second day of the NITRD meeting, and the final day of my IONS safari, I had a breakfast meeting with a colleague who was starting a nonprofit foundation to fund research to develop effective methods for early diagnosis of lung cancer. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths and kills roughly a half million people per year world-wide. If detected in its early stages the disease can often be cured by surgical removal of the tumor. Imaging technologies such as computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) show great promise for providing a means for early diagnosis of lung cancer. Over the past few years OSA, along with the Prevent Cancer Foundation, has been instrumental in co-sponsoring workshops and meetings to explore the use of CT imaging in early detection of lung cancer. We discussed imaging and molecular analysis technologies and their growing roles in helping to reduce lung cancer mortality.

This was a very productive trip and I have made many new friends over the past several weeks. OSA was the inspiration for this blog, intending to provide interested student members a feel for some of the aspects of being president of OSA. My best regards to all of you who made this journey with me…

Talks, Teaching, and Tapas

From Glasgow, we flew to Barcelona to a brand new photonics facility just outside of town called Institut de Ciències Fotòniques or ICFO. According to Professor Lluis Turner, ICFO founder and current director, “ICFO is a young, fast growing research institution that aims at advancing the limits of scientific and technological knowledge in optical sciences.” ICFO is funded by the Spanish government and the European Union and is thriving. The faculty is comprised of a multinational, multidisciplinary group of photonics experts in a wide variety of fields. They have recruited an energized group of students from countries around the world creating a unique multicultural atmosphere, where in any given conversation the language can abruptly shift from English to Spanish to French to German to Italian and so on. The laboratory and office facilities are state of the art and the location is near the Catalonian Mediterranean coast.

The students at ICFO organized and played host to the fifth meeting of the International OSA Network of Students or IONS 5. It is difficult for me to capture in words the atmosphere at this student organized and financed event. The scientific talks were excellent quality, the organization was flawless, and the enthusiasm of the attendees for optics and photonics was unmatched by any conference I have attended. There were roughly 20 oral and 20 poster presentations on a wide range of topics. The poster session was held in a hallway where the 75 or so attendees would gather during breaks. The noise level during the poster sessions was so high that one had to speak at full volume to be heard. Students came from all over Europe, as well as several students from North America and Africa. Each chapter had the opportunity to share their success stories about educational outreach activities and student chapter activities during the past year.

My wife Bobbi and I were guests at a dinner organized by the ICFO faculty and which include Maria Yzuel, the current president of SPIE. The restaurant was located near the beach, the food was excellent and we spent the evening discussing world politics, European soccer, and the best wine regions in Europe; all topics which tended to illicit a wide range of comments and strong opinions from my dinner mates.

IONS5 ended with a conference banquet held at a local Tapas restaurant which involved over 60 students and faculty and a Saturday tour of Barcelona guided by ICFO students. The IONS5 meeting was the original motivation for my European trip (IONS Safari), my first trip abroad as OSA president. As I mentioned, it is impossible for me to capture in words the atmosphere at this event, which apparently was similar to the tone of the previous IONS meetings. I strongly encourage any of you who have a chance to drop by one of the IONS meetings to take advantage of this unique opportunity to mingle with the next generation of optics and photonics scientists and engineers. You will find it truly inspiring.