SPIE Student Chapter at the University of Wisconsin- Madison Annual Report 2016 1. Student Officers President Heidi Kletzien hakletzien@wisc.edu SPIE ID#: 3730234 Vice President Md Abdul Kader Sagar Abdul.kader.sagar@gmail.com SPIE ID#: 3655331 Treasurer Samuel Alkmin alkminsamuel@gmail.com SPIE ID#: 4024063 Secretary John Krutty krutty@wisc.edu SPIE ID#: 3727801 Outreach Director Michael Pinkert mpinkert@wisc.edu SPIE ID#: 3712838 2. Chapter Members (according to the SPIE website) Adam Budde Kirby Campbell Rajeev Chaudhary John Garrett John Hayes Tiffany Heaster Jeff Hunker Darian James Adib Keikhosravi Andrew Khalil Honghyuk Kim Heidi Kletzien John Krutty Yinsheng Li Gregory Mosby David Mummy Ryan Niemeier Erick Oberstar Michael Pinkert Md Abdul Kader Sagar Jordan Slagowski Chenghao Wan Not currently on the site listing, but recently renewed membership: Samuel Alkmin Note: We have several regular attendees of chapter meetings who have yet to become official SPIE student members, but we are continuously working to get their commitment! 3. Chapter Activities We are pleased to say our student chapter here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had yet another great year. Our chapter had many well attended events in the avenues of professional development, chapter social outings, visiting distinguished lectures, and community education outreach. As our chapter has continued to gain good publicity and exposure, attendance at our events have been excellent and recruiting, especially for officers who want to get involved, has been getting easier. Participating in the Wisconsin Involvement Network s semester organization recruitment fair that took place in January was a boost in our recruitment
endeavor, especially to get more undergraduate students exposed to our group (although we are still working on getting more of them further involved). In February, we held a chapter social/teambuilding outing with our group partaking in icombat Laser Tag here in Madison. This outing was so incredibly fun and it seemed to have really brought our group together! We all met up at the laser tag place a little early to discuss chapter status. After the laser tag session, we all went to a local restaurant to talk about how much fun we had as well as plan/brainstorm our future events. Here is a picture of our group all geared up ready to roll! In March, we participated in a professional development activity in which one of the main microscope facilities on campus gave a tutorial on how to use Image J image analysis software. The event was packed full of students. The feedback we received was tremendous, so we are planning on expanding on this next year. In April, we were planning on hosting Prof. Francesco Pavone from Italy to be our distinguished guest lecturer, but unfortunately, travel plans did not work out and he was forced to cancel. We made up for it in May though when we were able to host Prof. Ramin Pashaie, an associate professor of electrical engineering at UW-Milwaukee. His talk titled, Optical Brain Interfaces was a huge success in which he discussed his recent advancements on instruments utilizing optogenics and neuroimaging for control over neural functions and genetic targeting. He showed many cool applications to study circuitry in psychiatric and neurological disorders.
In September, we held our yearly kick-off meeting where we really push for recruiting efforts. This is a meeting split between an informal introduction of who we are what we do for some of the newcomers, a collective brainstorm to set some plans for the school year, followed by a chapter bowling outing at the Union South bowling alley just down the street. Attendance was very good for the first part, but unfortunately, only had about 15 members make it to the bowling outing. Overall though, the large turnout, especially of new faces, showed that our recruiting push to start the semester was successful. In October, we were very, very fortunate to have the pleasure of hosting Prof. Changhuei Yang from CalTech. His talk titled, Focusing light into biological tissues with wavefront engineering was super fascinating in which he talked about time-reversal optical focusing and Fourier ptychography. His visit was very well received as his formal research talk was awesome and he had a ton of advice to give us for our future careers either in industry or in academia. His talk was well attended with a picture (only showing about half of the attendees, as many were too shy to come to the front) shown below. In November, we held our officer election in which many people stepped up to fill some roles vacated by some graduating officers. We believe this is largely due to our recent successful meetings in which the members enthusiasm in our SPIE/OSA student chapter was obvious and contagious. Our chapter has been even more active in community outreach this year, participating in
Saturday Science days at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery (WID) every other month, the Summer Science Festival, as well as Morgridge Summer Science Camps. As described in a previous annual report, Saturday Science occurs on the first Saturday of the month, and is an event where several local organizations set up booths related to the scientific theme of that month, and all members of the community are welcome to come, bring their families, and learn about scientific topics in a manner that is designed to engage young children. We typically try to participate in at least every other month, and often will see as many 300 attendees from the community that we have the opportunity to interact with. These events are very fun and rewarding for chapter members, and help promote science to kids at a young age. To further complement Saturday Science outreach events, we also participate in the Summer Science Festival (~400 people) and Summer Science Camps (~75 students) hosted at the WID. For these events, we have the opportunity to present our demonstrations and lectures to high school students, allowing us to provide more in depth explanations of the optical phenomena we show, as well as offer practical advice to students interested in pursuing scientific related fields in undergraduate and graduate education. New this year we participated in Crestwood Elementary s Science Night that was also lots of fun with a great school turnout of about 250 young ones as well as an event at the Madison Arboretum in which we set up tables for our handheld microscope demos explaining how optics and micrscopes work as well as an image guessing game where we took many pictures of various plants around the Arboretum and had our visitors (~100 came through) guess the image to the actual plant/flower. A few pictures of us doing outreach are shown below.
This past year, our previous Treasurer and newly elected President, Heidi Kletzien, was the recipient of the SPIE Officer Travel grant to attend the SPIE Optics and Photonics conference in San Diego. We were also extremely blessed that Andrew Khalil was asked to be both a discussion leader for the leadership workshop. It is always a great opportunity to be able to interact and network with SPIE student chapter leaders from around the world. 4. Future Chapter Plans Our chapter s future plans again include keeping up with many of the things that went well this year, such as laser tag, outreach education and our kick-off meetings. Again, we will take part in Wisconsin Involvement Network s semester organization recruitment fair that will again take place in January, host our semiannual kick-off meeting in mid-february and again push for a good turnout with some strong recruiting efforts. We signed up again for the Wisconsin Involvement Network s semester organization recruitment fair to continue to aid in our recruitment endeavor. In March or April, we will try again to host Prof. Francesco Pavone to give what I am sure will be an incredible seminar. We will definitely have another chapter social/teambuilding outing with our group partaking in icombat Laser Tag as so many members loved it and it seems like they do not stop talking about it. This fell through last year, so we are going to try again to organize an industry tour visit at Promega here in Madison, WI for May. We also super interested in inviting Profs. Garth Simpson, Alberto Diasporo or Adam Hoppe for the Fall semester. For conferences, we wish to try to send a couple of the officers to Optics and Photonics in San Diego in August. 5. Financial Information Balance from last annual report (12/1/15): $1,064.50
Funds from SPIE: +$1100 Funds from OSA: +$400 Expended Funds: -$1194.26 (SPIE and OSA funds) February Semester Kickoff Meeting: $103.49 (refreshments) May Chapter Meeting (visiting speaker): $205.70 (refreshments) May Student Member lunch with visiting speaker: $109.59 May visiting speaker parking fees: $23.00 May visiting speaker hotel: $105.00 July officers meeting: $18.98 (refreshments) September semester kickoff meeting: $165.42 (refreshments) September bowling social outing: $85.00 (15 members bowling) October Chapter meeting (visiting speaker): $189.64 (refreshments) October Student Member lunch with visiting speaker: $149.39 Optics Outreach equipment purchases: $63.27 (flashlights/laser pointers) Current Account Balance: $1,370.24 Our student Chapter s Tax ID: 26-1333727