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SPIE Annual

Report University of Michigan Chapter

2016

Est. August 2012

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Overview

This is the annual report for the Optics Society at the University of Michigan (OSUM), a joint student

chapter of SPIE and OSA. OSUM has OSA, SPIE, and non-affiliated student members. As of 1 August

2016, we have 21 OSA student members, 18 SPIE student members, and over 120 people on our email

list. We reach our members via email lists, Facebook, and twitter.

This report details the activities from this year in the categories of:

Outreach

Academic Activities

Industrial Activities

Social

Plans for the new year

These activities are in line with our mission to “promote the discipline of Optical Science and

Engineering through the organized effort of students and faculty, disseminate knowledge of the field of

Optics and Photonics, and to further the professional development of the students.”

Connect with OSUM on multiple platforms!

Check out our MaizePage: https://maizepages.umich.edu/organization/optics

or our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/OpticsUMICH/

or our Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpticsUMICH

or our Website: osum.osahost.org

or our Google Calendar: opticsUMICH@gmail.com

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Table of Contents Overview ....................................................................................................................................................... 2

SPIE Chapter Officers .................................................................................................................................... 4

Executive Board ............................................................................................................................................ 4

SPIE Members ............................................................................................................................................... 4

SPIE Alumni ................................................................................................................................................... 5

Budget ........................................................................................................................................................... 6

Outreach ....................................................................................................................................................... 7

Demonstration Day at Slauson Middle School with Society of Women in ............................................... 7

Physics (SWIP) ........................................................................................................................................... 7

Celebrating Maxwell's Equations: 150 Years ............................................................................................ 8

Back to the Bricks Festival - Flint, MI ........................................................................................................ 9

WESO - Circuit Wizardy ............................................................................................................................. 9

Academic Activities………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..10

Student-Faculty Welcome Mixer ............................................................................................................ 10

Conferences and Symposia ..................................................................................................................... 10

Faculty Seminar ....................................................................................................................................... 10

Summer Optics Study Group .................................................................................................................. 10

Qualifying Exam Preparations ................................................................................................................. 11

Industrial Activities ..................................................................................................................................... 11

Publicity ....................................................................................................................................................... 11

Socials.......................................................................................................................................................... 11

AAOSA mixer ........................................................................................................................................... 11

Game night .............................................................................................................................................. 12

Picnic ....................................................................................................................................................... 13

PhD Defense Support .............................................................................................................................. 14

Upcoming Plans .......................................................................................................................................... 14

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SPIE Chapter Officers

Position Name Email

President Gle Leung lhofai@umich.edu

Vice-President Arnab Hazari harnab@umich.edu

Treasurer Zhizheng Zhang zvzhang@umich.edu

Secretary Qiaochu Li qiaochul@umich.edu

Advisor John Nees nees@umich.edu

Executive Board

Position Name Email

Outreach chair James Chapman jamechap@umich.edu

Social chair Mahdi Aghadjani mahdia@umich.edu

SPIE Members

Name Membership expires Email

John Bailey 6 December 2016 jcbailey@umich.edu

Long Chen 29 July 2016 lonchen@umich.edu

Qiushu Chen 21 November 2016 qschen@umich.edu

Theresa Chick 6 January 2017 tfchick@umich.edu

Caleb Coburn 30 July 2016 calebcob@umich.edu

Ceren Dag 1 November 2016 cbdag@umich.edu

Elizabeth Dreyer 25 January 2017 efcloos@umich.edu

Heather Ferguson 9 December 2016 hthrfrg@umich.edu

Michael Haines 30 December 2016 mkhaines@umich.edu

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Arnab Hazari 31 March 2017 harnab@umich.edu

Kyu Hyun Kim 7 January 2017 kyhykim@umich.edu

Gle Leung 10 May 2017 lhofai@umich.edu

Nooshin Mohammadi Estakhri 3 January 2017 estakhri@umich.edu

Yue Qu 29 July 2016 quyue@umich.edu

Qiaochu Li 24 July 2017 qiaochul@umich.edu

Shang Hua Yang 8 January 2017 shanghua@umich.edu

Cheng Zhang 12 October 2016 chengzh@umich.edu

Zhizheng Zhang 26 July 2016 zvzhang@umich.edu

SPIE Alumni

Name Email Graduation date

Leng-Chun Chen lengleng@umich.edu July 2014

I-Ning Hu andrehu@umich.edu August 2015

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Budget

The primary source of funding for the Optics Society at the University of Michigan is our parent

organizations, SPIE and OSA. Additional funding sources are available through the university. We also

received corporate sponsorships for the outreach activities of our sister organization – the Michigan

Light Project.

Balance as of August 1, 2015: $7019.69. ($4200.45 allocated for outreach in collaboration with the Michigan Light Project. General Balance $2819.24)

Amount Reason funds received or used Date

Old funds $7019.69 Rollover from 2015 August 1, 2015

Funds exp ended

$146.28 OSUM Picnic August 7, 2015

$387.32 OSUM Welcome Mixer October 7, 2015

$148.04 International Year of Light (IYL)- Supplies September 25, 2015

$71.88 OSUM Game Night March 31, 2016

$307.93 OSUM Student Demo Competition November 20, 2015

$300.00 OSUM Student Demo Prize November 20, 2015

$108.07 OSUM Seminar – Food and Drink September 24, 2015

$106.76 SWIP Demo March 10, 2016

$22.22 IYL – Maxwell Equation Demo March 31, 2016

$42.88 OSUM Elections April 5, 2016

$35.17 Bagels for Group Study Meetings June 27 – July 11, 2016 (ongoing)

Amount Reason funds received or used Date

SPIE funding received

$700.00 SPIE Funds January 25, 2016

Other funding received

$1350.00 OSA Funds February 26, 2016

Balance as of August 1, 2016: $7393.14. ($4030.19 allocated for outreach in collaboration with the Michigan Light Project. General Balance $3362.95)

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Outreach

Outreach is one of the core missions of our student chapter. We believe that it is our duty to inspire the next generation to study light, plus it is a ton of fun! This year we had four major optics outreach activities as described below.

Demonstration Day at Slauson Middle School with Society of Women in Physics (SWIP) 11 March 2016 Event Overview: In collaboration with the Society of Women in Physics (SWIP), we brought short demonstrations to a local middle school. Throughout the day, eighth grade classes rotated through 8 stations of physics demonstrations in small groups. As the optics society, we brought two demonstrations focusing on Index of Refraction Matching as well as Total Internal Reflection (TIR). Each of these demonstrations were linked to real world scenarios and applications, such as, why Pyrex glass disappears in cooking oil, or how TIR allows us to have fast internet through fiber optics. In total, we reached over 250 eighth grade students and their teachers.

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Celebrating Maxwell's Equations: 150 Years 20 November 2015

Event Overview: The IEEE Southeastern Michigan Chapter IV and the University of Michigan’s Electrical & Computer Engineering Department hosted a special celebration marking the 150th anniversary of Maxwell’s equations, as part of the 2015 International Year of Light. The celebration included guest speakers, a student demo competition, and open discussion with a panel of experts. Our group coordinated the student demo competition by attracting entries and judges, raising funds for the awards, and hosting the competition itself. We interacted with about 100 college-aged students and IEEE industry members. Event: http://www.ece.umich.edu/events/Maxwell/ Press: http://eecs.umich.edu/eecs/about/articles/2015/celebrating-maxwells-equations.html

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Back to the Bricks Festival - Flint, MI 15 August 2015

Event Overview: The Back to the Bricks Festival (BttB) is a five day event centered around a two-day Rolling Car Cruise and saturday car show in downtown Flint, MI. During the Saturday car show, the Michigan Light Project had a tent in an area dedicated to automotive related educational groups. Next to our tent was Baker College’s Automotive Program and a FIRST robotics team. The Michigan Light project ran optics-related demonstrations and activities from 8 AM to 5 PM on Saturday, August 15. We estimate that we interacted with 500 people with about 20% being over 50-years-old. We ran 6 different activities centered on diffraction, color, solar telescopy, solar power, microscopy, and piezoelectricity. They were very well received by the festival-goers of all ages - kids and seniors!

WESO - Circuit Wizardy The Washtenaw Elementary Science Olympiad (WESO) is a partner of the national Science Olympiad. Primary school children throughout southeastern Michigan represent their schools in teams of 3-4 (per subject area) and compete in a fun tournament that fosters excitement in science. To build their skills, each team trains in a variety of ways. Over four consecutive Saturdays, our group held 2-hour workshops to train children in the greater Ann Arbor school district (roughly 25 children at each workshop) about circuits. We created the entirety of the workshop content by ourselves and used a

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variety of interactive teaching methods. Our workshop was received so well that we’ve already been invited back for next year! https://sites.google.com/a/aaps.k12.mi.us/weso-wizards/home

Academic Activities

Student-Faculty Welcome Mixer

The Optics Student/Faculty Welcome Mixer is one of OSUM’s capstone events each fall. It gives

incoming students a chance to meet current optics students, faculty, and staff from a wide variety of

optics-related disciplines. New PhD and Master’s students often don’t know with whom they want to

do research. This event gives them the opportunity to learn about a variety of research groups directly

from the researchers. We also requested that faculty bring a graduate student with them who can

give interested new students a lab tour after the mixer.

Conferences and Symposia

This year was a productive year for our society in terms of conference involvement. In the fall, we sent

our publicity officer, Qiaochu Li, to the Frontiers in Optics Conference. Qiaochu gave a presentation to

the E-board about things he learned at the conference. This year, President Gle Leung will be attending

the SPIE Optics and Photonics at the end of August in San Diego. Besides sending officers to student

chapter development activities, we also helped OSUM members coordinate with each other when

attending conferences. This helped OSUM members to split room and travel costs when available.

Faculty Seminar We held a faculty seminar on September 25th, 2015, entitled “Metamaterials to Tailor and Enhance”. The speaker was Dr Pai-Yen Chen from Wayne State University. In his talk, Dr Chen spoke on how plasmonic nanostructures and metamaterials offer unprecedented opportunities to tailor and enhance the interaction of waves with materials. He described his group’s recent progress and research in these research areas, showing how tailored nanostructures and suitable arrangements of them into (1-D) nanoantennas, (2-D) metasurfaces, and (3-D) metamaterials may open exciting venues to manipulate and control light at nanoscale dimensions. He discussed their most recent theoretical and experimental findings, including plasmonic devices to

control, localize and emit light, giant nonlinearities and quantum optical effects in properly tailored

nanoantennas and metasurfaces, and new avenues for harvesting and conversion of emissive energy

using metamaterials. Physical insights into these exotic phenomena, new devices based on these

concepts, and their impact on technology were discussed during the talk.

Summer Optics Study Group

As a summer study plan, a 10 week study group focusing on classical optics has been organized as a

professional development event as well as a means to recruit more members from non-engineering

majors. The study was aimed at enriching attendees knowledge of the science of optics and how to

effectively apply it in their research. All University of Michigan students were welcome to join our study.

Participants included undergraduate and graduate students at an average of 10 a week. We used several

textbooks including Fourier Optics by Goodman and Optical Waves in Crystals by Yariv and Yeh. We

gained further experience on how to organize a study group as a student chapter.

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Qualifying Exam Preparations

One of OSUM’s missions is to build community among the optics students at the University of Michigan

and support them at all levels of their academic career. One major milestone of a PhD student at the

University of Michigan is the qualifying exam. The qualifying exam usually occurs in the second year of

the PhD program after the fundamental classes have been completed and consists of four one-on-one

oral examinations with professors. For the third year in a row, OSUM has supported our members by

hosting mock-qualifying exams three times a year. For each mock-exam, we invite the exam takers to

present their research to older members who have already passed their exams. The older members ask

questions about their research and any other optical topics that they may need to know for their exam.

This event has been well received by both the students taking the exams and the other members.

Industrial Activities

In terms of facilitating the industry connections, we served the society members mainly in the career fair

this year. First, we made a list of all the optics-related companies a week before the career fair and

shared with the members. From the members’ feedback, the list was very useful for them to plan their

fast-paced two days of job hunting. In addition, we held a coffee hour at the noon time on the second

day. 7 members stopped by our coffee station and shared information and their experience of job

hunting. Specially, a research scientist from the astronomy department shared the story of his academia

path and why he is transitioning to the industry. People seemed enjoy the coffee hour and learned a lot

from others’ experience.

Publicity

This year, the publicity section helped in making flyers and posting on our Facebook and Twitter page for

2 events, the Optics student/faculty welcome mixer at the beginning of last fall as well as the seminar on

Nanoantennas, metasurfaces and metamaterials to tailor and enhance light-matter interactions (Prof.

Pai-Yen Chen, Sept. 25th 2015).

Socials

AAOSA mixer Ann Arbor OSA is the professional section of the Optical Society in Ann Arbor. On 15 July 2016, OSUM

members joined AAOSA members at the Arbor Brewing Company in Ypsilanti, MI for an evening of

conversation and food. OSUM members were able to meet local professionals and learn about the

activities of the professional section.

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Game night In February 2016, OSUM had its very first board game night. Approximately 10 to 15 of us were present. We played games such as Blokus, Apples to Apples and Starflux. This game night provided the opportunity for OSUM members to get to know each other and bond over a hobby which many of us have. We also had Dominos’ pizza and snacks which truly contributed to the casual board game experience. We are certainly planning to have more game nights in the near future.

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Picnic In August last year, OSUM had our summer picnic by the Lurie Reflecting pond. Aside from the good food and company, there were also fun activities such as bubble blowing. It was also a good opportunity for new members of OSUM to interact with existing members, thereby learning more about OSUM’s purpose and activities.

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PhD Defense Support

One of the biggest highlights and stressful times of one’s academic career is giving a PhD Defense

presentation. To make these a little less stressful, OSUM advertises member’s defenses. Many members

show up to the defense and sometimes we even prepare ‘easy’ questions in advance. This year we

celebrated over eight successful PhD defenses.

Upcoming Plans

The upcoming 2016-2017 year is going to be a wonderful 5th year for OSUM. Activities we already have

planned include

Optics Student-Faculty Welcome Mixer

Optics-related Career Fair events

Invited speakers

Outreach events

We thank SPIE for their continued support of our student chapter and are excited for the new year.