UR SPIE Student Chapter

Thank you to all who attended our General Interest Meeting 2021 and Happy
Hour at Beer Market. We look forward to seeing new faces at our events!

We are over halfway through our Summer Speaker Series. We’ve had a series of great talks started off by Professor Postigo. We have three more coming up – thank you to all our great speakers!

Congratulations Ben Moon and the outreach team on winning 3rd place in the SPIE 2021 Optics Outreach Games! Happy International Day of Light. See our video and others: https://spie.org/about-spie/international-day-of-light/idl-optics-outreach-games?SSO=1

In this video, Ben demonstrates the refractive index of water and its impact on the apparent location of an object in a pan. The photo on the left shows the pan with the object blocked by the edge of the pan, the photo on the right shows the object visible once the pan is filled with water. See his full explanation at the link above!

On April 27th, Dr. Arti Agrawal gave a scientific lecture on “Modelling Nanophotonic and Plasmonic Components” and shared some of her personal journey in “Diversity and Inclusion in STEM” as part of the Alliance for Diversity in Science and Engineering’s Diversity in STEM Lecture Series, co-hosted by our SPIE chapter.

In April, we had our second mental health panel with three alumni panelists and two counselors from UHS. We discussed topics from imposter syndrome (tip: learn to change what you call a “successful” day) to burnout (stress+rest=growth – look for the right amount of stress). Thank you panelists for a great discussion!

Our panelists:

Katelynn Bauer received her B.S. in Optical Engineering in 2012 and her Ph.D. in Optics in 2017, both from the University of Rochester.  Her thesis was entitled “Polarization-Dependent Coherence Measurements of Scattered Light Fields,” and was co-advised by Professor Thomas Brown and Professor Miguel Alonso.  She is currently a Laser System Scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester.