SPIE Student Chapter at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Annual Report 2014 1. Student Officers President Joseph Szulczewski jszulczewski@wisc.edu SPIE ID#: 3416265 Vice President - Benjamin Cox Bcox1@wisc.edu SPIE ID#: 3444039 Treasurer Andrew Khalil Askhalili@wisc.edu SPIE ID#: 3542288 Secretary Rajeev Chaudhary Rajeev.chaudhary86@gmail.com SPIE ID#: 3531471 Outreach Director Kirby Campbell Kirb8989@gmail.com SPIE ID#: 3527352 2. Chapter Members (according to the SPIE website) Kirby Campbell Chun-Chieh Chang Rajeev Chaudhary David Dunkerley John Garrett Yongshuai Ge Charles Hatt James Hermus Adib Keikhosravi Andrew Khalil Ian Linsmeier Amy Lowitz Kevin Royalty Md Abdul Kader Sagar Qi Shao Zach Simmons Jordan Slagowski Joseph Szulczewski Zhu Wang Not on the site, but recently renewed membership last week: Ben Cox Quinton Guerrero Note: We have many more people who attend our meetings and are continuously working on getting them to officially sign up!
3. Chapter Activities This year has continuously impressed us and has definitely been one of our best years yet. Our manner in recruiting individuals has changed, and we have developed relationships with members in a much greater capacity than in the past. This made the strong push for recruitment more fun for all those involved. As a result, our recognition on campus has improved tremendously. We have been much more structured when it comes to our monthly meetings as we strive to balance professional development and social outings with the group. We have really diversified our monthly meetings by engaging more with what the group members want to get out of the meetings as well as what we as officers hope to achieve. This has removed the classical chapter meeting of member giving presentations to a new structure of invited guests/local industry giving presentations every other month. Our meetings have evolved from the typically start with a 10-15 minute meet and greet followed by a discussion of our previous events, and having a speaker come to something more member-oriented. The meetings now are more focused on professional development, and these meetings have been more useful not only for the members, but for us as officers as well. For example, last April we had a professional development seminar on How to Visually Communicate Science. An artist and scientist in biochemistry here at UW, H. Adam Steinberg gave a wonderful talk on how to give a proper poster presentation and what is the best way to present data within one. His topics expanded to simple and effective layout techniques, how to make an impact on the viewer, storytelling, stimulating imagination, the importance of color or lack thereof, and what scientists can learn from artists, to name a few. His talk was the most well received of our Spring 2014 semester. We provided refreshments, and his talk promoted our group substantially. Dr. Joerg Bewersdorf from Yale School of Medicine, a consultant for Bruker, came to give a talk about superresolution techniques earlier this semester, and we provided refreshments. Interest for this meeting was high, reflected by the great amount of attendance for this meeting, and this gave us an opportunity to plug the group for much of the audience was non-members. The professor and Bruker consultant was able to grab the attention of the diverse audience for his allegiances were aligned to both industrial and academic realms. After the meeting, the officers had dinner with both Dr. Bewersdorf and his Bruker counterpart, which allowed us to gain a larger insight into the industry. The following month our meeting was more socially-engaged, for we went bowling with members in which we provided refreshments and paid for the discounted lanes. This provided the outlet to facilitate discussion about topics the members were interested in for the upcoming year. A few weeks ago, we had a social outing to play laser tag with members. It was quite a fun experience for all. Additionally, we were able to build personal rapports with the
membership, which has shown in higher turnout at monthly meetings. Our new approach to meetings this year has been successful, and it enables us to engage more with the membership. Also, it is good to note the impact of outreach activities for our group. The numbers in attendance as well as the diverse styles and locations of our work has soared greatly over this past year. We have continued our annual rapport with previous endeavors of the Wisconsin Science Festival (~200 children visit our booth), and the Science Expedition (~250 children visit our booth), but we have added quite a few more events to our docket. Since our chapter has seen an increase in enthusiastic members, we have been more involved around the community. We continue to participate in the Saturday Sciences at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, which are very rewarding as we teach about 50-100 kids per session about light in different aspects of science. This past year, our treasurer, Andrew Khalil, was the recipient of the SPIE Officer Travel grant to attend the SPIE Optics and Photonics conference in San Diego. In addition, we were also extremely thankful that our Outreach Director, Kirby Campbell, was asked to be both a discussion leader for the leadership workshop and act as the student representative at the Membership Committee Meeting. Recently, our chapter president Joe Szulczewski was awarded the SPIE Officer travel grant to Photonics West in San Francisco. It is always a great opportunity to be able to interact and network with SPIE student chapter leaders from around the world!
4. Chapter Plans We are keeping up with outreach events as stated above, especially Saturday Science every month, and we are always looking for more! We plan on having a guest lecturer come to speak to us about the transition from academia to industry this month. He is a UW alumnus working for a local optics company here in Madison, so the presentation will be quite relevant and extremely useful for all attendees. For the next semester, we have setup a visiting lecturer, Dr. Adam Wax of the biomedical engineering department at Duke University. His work in early cancer detection through the use of optical spectroscopy is very well-known, and the group is very excited to welcome him to Madison! In January, we will make another huge push for recruitment, visiting classrooms and labs across campus with a goal of adding at least five new members for next semester. This semester our official membership total is 20 members (18 on the website, but 20 actual members). This is consistent with our goals from last year, which shows that we are achieving a stability the group did not have before the restructuring of the group s leadership; however, we hope to improve and gain more interest with the following semester. We signed up for the Wisconsin Involvement Network s semester organization recruitment fair that takes place on January 30 th to aide in this endeavor. Thus, we believe 30 members would be a realistic goal for the next year. We have plans in the upcoming semester to visit a local branch of Bruker s Fluorescence Microscopy division, located in Middleton, WI. The hope is that this event will give the opportunity for our members to learn more about the field as well as a career in industry. In terms of conferences, last year s conference in San Diego was incredible, and it seems as though we may be able to keep this tradition going on by sending at least a couple chapter members there each year.
5. Financial Information Balance from last annual report (12/1/13): $263.63 Funds from SPIE: $0 for this year This year we did not receive funds from SPIE. As noted below, we received funds from OSA, which allowed us to provide additional refreshments and social outings for members. We are currently applying for the SPIE Chapter Activity grant that is due next week. As there was a transition of leadership last year and our group is a combined effort of both organizations, we unintentionally disregarded deadlines for a few different grants between both SPIE and OSA. We unfortunately overlooked the SPIE activity grant from last year. We are doing our best to improve our rapport with members to maintain membership, as well as the organizations themselves and their deadlines. Funds from OSA: +$ 1,100.00 Expended Funds: -$884.55 (SPIE and OSA funds) January Chapter Meeting: $130.17 (refreshments) January dinner with visiting speaker: $83.00 February dinner with visiting speaker: $117.74 March Chapter Meeting: $56.03 (refreshments) April Chapter Meeting: $132.03 (refreshments) September Chapter Meeting: $177.58 (refreshments) September dinner with visiting speaker: $113.00 October Social Outing: $75.00 (15 members bowling) Current Account Balance: $451.08