2012 northwestern university spie chapter annual report · 2013. 3. 21. · 2012 northwestern...

2012 Northwestern University SPIE Chapter – Annual Report Grant Author, E-mail, and Department: President : Erdem Cicek | [email protected] | Electrical Engineering Vice President : Monica So | [email protected] | Chemistry Department Secretary: Shiqiang Li | [email protected] | Material Science Treasurer: Guanxi Chen | [email protected] | Electrical Engineering Web-Master: Andrew Rasmussen | [email protected] | Chemistry Department Date: Jan 17, 2013 Advisor: Bruce Lindvall, [email protected] Brief description of our group: Our mission is to increase the awareness and knowledge of the Northwestern and Evanston community on photonics by engaging them in educational events, social activities and volunteering. We follow a four-pronged approach to fulfill-our goals:

1. The student speaker series provides a forum for discussion and discourse for the NU graduate community. PhD and postdoctoral students present their work on photonics, optics, and/or cutting edge research to their peers. Speakers benefit from these talks by collecting feedback from their peers, while the audience gains insight about the most recent research being done in their field of interest.

2. The professional development speaker series enhance the "soft-skills" which are critical in

preparing for professional life. Invited speakers, who are experts in career development, teach students about how to most efficiently apply transferable skills from the graduate environment to the job market.

3. Social events allow our members to create supportive networks. By organizing night-out events at local venues, our members not only eat and mingle in a friendly atmosphere but gain insight through sharing their common experiences as graduate students, despite being from different backgrounds and fields.

4. SPIE’s outreach efforts at Evanston’s school district create enriching learning experiences for both graduate student volunteers and the local community. Our long-term relationship with local elementary schools allows SPIE volunteers to teach fifth graders about the properties of light. New volunteers are trained in a briefing for an hour before each outing. A team of 3-5 NU graduate volunteers visit a different school on a monthly basis to expose the students to science at a young age. The 2.5-hour session consists of a show-and-tell on interesting light-related demonstrations followed by a group activity. The activity divides the class into groups of three, whereby the students are given the objective to 'hit-the-target'; a laser beam will reflect off of two sets of mirrors before hitting the 'bulls-eye'. The students receive a taste of what engineering is: science and mathematics intertwined with teamwork.

mailto:[email protected]





2012 Northwestern University SPIE Chapter – Annual Report The year’s activities to date. (DETAILS CAN BE FOUND AT OUR WEBSITE http://spie.mccormick.northwestern.edu/)

1. NU Photonics Kick-off Meeting (Sep 2011): Welcoming event for members that introduced the executive board, club’s mission and layout of the year’s planned events.

2. Photonics Speaker Series: Invited speakers on photonics related topics of recent interest. Speakers included graduate students and post-doctorates at NU. These events were held during noon hour with lunch provided.

a. 09/15/2011 Yanbo Bai: “High Performance Quantum Cascade Lasers”

b. 10/28/2011 Debyendu Dey: “Plasmonic Nanoantenna for High Sensitive Chip-Scale Bio-Sensing”

c. 01/20/2012 Ionut Trestian: “Taming User-Generated Content in Mobile Networks via Drop Zones”

d. 02/23/2012 Wei Zhao: “Manipulating and Amplifying Optical Fields by Strongly Coupled Plasmon Resonator Arrays”

e. 04/19/2012 Chao-Hsiang Chen: “Low noise detection with quadrature squeezing using pulsed traveling-wave optical fields”

3. Professional Speaker Series:

a. Susan Caplan (Dec 2 2011): Using Networking Tools to Market Yourself

Susan Caplan is an acknowledged writer and skilled business communication and marketing strategist with excellent verbal, written, presentation and interpersonal skills. She works in the manufacturing, packaged goods and service industries helping companies to enroll and engage employees and customers around corporate goals and initiatives. Susan specializes in employee engagement, change management, work/life and diversity initiatives, marketing, sales and training.

b. Susan Caplan (Feb 15 2012): How to Market Yourself Like Steve Jobs Abstract: There are lessons we can learn from the late Steve Jobs on how to position yourself in the marketplace during your job search. Susan Caplan will lead the session and also discuss how to build an elevator/sales pitch and utilize online tools available to you to make your job search strategic. Getting the career you want takes preparation, planning and utilizing all the tools available. Leave nothing to chance; make your job search strategic.

c. Kamilah McCoy and Larry Jackson (May 17, 2012): Elements of a Successful Job Search Two representatives from the Northwestern University Career Services Center (UCS) discussed how to use the summer to effectively plan a job, since the main recruitment season for scientists and engineers occurs in the fall. This workshop covered the elements of a successful industrial job search, including identifying one’s strengths, marketing academic work to employers, structuring the job search, and using exclusive NU resources.

http://spie.mccormick.northwestern.edu/

http://spie.mccormick.northwestern.edu/events/2011-12-02_susan_caplan/Susan_Caplan_Bio_2011.pdf

2012 Northwestern University SPIE Chapter – Annual Report

4. SPIE Faculty Speaker – Prof. Mark Hersam (May 4th 2012): Chemically Refined Carbon Nanomaterials Abstract: Carbon nanomaterials have attracted significant attention due to their potential to improve applications such as transistors, optoelectronic devices, transparent conductors, solar cells, batteries, and biosensors. This talk will highlight our latest efforts to develop strategies for purifying, functionalizing, and assembling carbon nanomaterials into functional devices. For example, we have recently developed and commercialized a scalable technique for sorting surfactant-encapsulated single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) by their physical and electronic structure using density gradient ultracentrifugation (DGU). The resulting monodisperse SWCNTs enhance the performance of thin film transistors, infrared optoelectronic devices, photovoltaics, catalysts, and transparent conductors. The DGU technique also enables multi-walled carbon nanotubes to be sorted by the number of walls and solution phase graphene to be sorted by thickness, thus expanding the suite of monodisperse carbon nanomaterials. By extending our DGU efforts to carbon nanotubes and graphene dispersed in biocompatible polymers (e.g., DNA, Pluronics, Tetronics, etc.), new opportunities have emerged for monodisperse carbon nanomaterials in biomedical applications.

Account Audit

Date Description Cost Balance

Starting Account Balance 1658,86

1/5/2012 SPIE Speaker Event Food 120.95 1537.71

1/5/2012 Event Gift Card 100 1437.71

1/10/2012 SPIE Free Membership 20 1417.71


2/15/2012 SPIE event soft drink 7.64 1390.07

2/15/2012 SPIE Speaker Event Food 160 1230.07



2/23/2012 SPIE Speaker Event Drink 11.45 912.53



3/14/2012 SPIE Nightout Event 251.37 621.16

4/11/2012 SPIE speaker gift 22.49 598.67

5/16/2012 Student Speaker and Professional 297.02 301.65


Speaker event

5/31/2012 UCS and SPIE event 185.01 116.64

Demographic Information

Do we have a survey after each event to encourage feedback from attendees? Yes, we collect the contact information and demographic information from attendees for each event and we create online surveys which have been sent out to all the attendees. We solicit feedback through our listserv and also inquire participants verbally after each event. How do we select attendees at our events if space is limited? How do we introduce new people to your activities?

2012 Northwestern University SPIE Chapter – Annual Report We are selecting attendees on the first-come-first serve basis. Most of our events have 30 to 40 attendees with 50 to 60 seats available. We have social events bimonthly, which our new people can mingle with our board members and SPIE members. We encourage new people into our activities by giving them priority to participate. For example, given the limited number of graduate students we can bring for volunteering, new-comers are given the opportunity to go first, while others who have gone before are placed on a wait-list. Activities Planned for 2013

1. Student Speaker Event 2. Club Member Social 3. Invite Professional Speaker. (Event will be held in fall) Last year’s event details were as follows;

Jean-luc Doumont is invited as a speaker to talk on leadership related topics of recent interest. Dr. Doumont’s talk was titled “How leaders persuade others” and This lecture took a rational approach to persuasion: it covered how to use personal/organizational power, how to deploy tactics on four different human planes, and how harness basic social influences to get others to accede more easily to our request “Being able to persuade others is an essential skill for a successful career. We must convince employers to hire us, persuade our boss to let us start a project, or get our coworker to help us out for a given job. In a sense, we are constantly “selling” our ideas-we want others to take a desire course of action. This talk is catered to the entire McCormick audience. We provided dinner for ~90 people. We were able to raise $1,400 through professional organization SPIE to cover the expenses such as honorarium, travel cost and the accommodation of the speaker.

Bring people together in a social context

Integrate academic and social aspects of graduate life

Improve communications and outreach

Encourage creative expression through the arts

Serve as a model for community building how our project meets one or more of these goals: The proposed project meets many of the goals listed above. Our activities are geared towards bringing interested members together in an educational and social setting. This primarily includes invited speakers, socials and outreach. The invited speakers allow present graduate students and post-docs to present their work to the NU community over lunch time where students are also encouraged to socialize and interact with the speaker and one another. The outreach at district 65 is intended to interest young minds and encourage their pursuit in science. It also allows graduate students to practice expressing ideas in an understandable way and imparting the rich knowledge that they have as NU’s ambassadors. Do we have a website?

We have a newly redesigned website at http://spie.mccormick.northwestern.edu/. On the site we detail how to join our group and how to join the national SPIE organization. The site also holds information about our past events from the last two years.



We advertise our events though e-mails to our listserv (currently 101 members) and to the Engineering, Materials Science and Chemistry e-mail lists.

We post fliers throughout Tech and the other scientific buildings on campus. We post events on Planit Purple. We post events in the TGS website. We have our events displayed on the McCormick TV screens throughout Tech.

Pictures are available on our website http://spie.mccormick.northwestern.edu/


2012 northwestern university spie chapter annual report · 2013. 3. 21. · 2012 northwestern...

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