Support for the 2012 OSA Biomedical Optics Meeting, Miami, Florida, April 29 - May 2, 2012

Optical Society Of America, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract #1247356 Rogan, Elizabeth The biannual Biomedical Optics Topical Meetings (BIOMED for short), organized by the Optical Society of America (OSA), is the premier meeting in the area of biomedical optics both in breadth and depth. Since the very first meeting in 1994, these meetings have grown in size from a few tens to over 500 attendees, and the majority is graduate students including female and other underrepresented students. Most of the technical sessions at the BIOMED meeting are relevant to the mission of quite a few programs at NSF. The meeting offers a unique opportunity for the biomedical optics community to share the exciting state-of-the-art technological developments, stimulate new ideas, learn new challenges and directions, and explore/promote new collaborations. The meeting also offers an effective platform to educate our students, future scientists and engineers in multidisciplinary fields and facilitate them to develop skills of collaborating with people from different backgrounds. This means bringing physical science and biological science students together, giving them opportunities to be informed about other disciplines, and finding ways to convince students to break out of the discipline-specific boundaries in which they often find themselves.