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…
