From 6 to 10 August there was SPIE Optics+Photonics 2017 in San Diego, CA, USA. Optics + Photonics is the largest annual optical science meeting in North America. It consists of some smaller conferences
related to different fields of optics: optical engineering and applications, nanotechnology, sustainable energy, organic photonics, and astronomical instrumentation.
Our lab was presented by our colleagues – PhD student Alexander Grebenchukov and Bachelor Student Maxim Masyukov. They both had won SPIE travel grants – Author Student and Officer ones, which
covered their travel expenses.
During the conference they took a part at the SPIE Student Leadership meeting. About 250 other students from different parts of the Earth have participated at this meeting. Student Leadership meeting was related to
different topics, such as leader skills, communication in science, how to persuade others, etc. The headliner of the event was Jean-luc Doumont – famous trainer in effective communication (PhD in
applied physics, Stanford). Also there was another science meeting–lunch with experts. During that meeting, there was an opportunity to communicate with famous professors and to see Newport Awards
ceremony.
On the other day Alexander and Maxim listened to lectures from well-known specialists in different fields of optics and presented their own researches. Alexander’s work was related to graphene topics.
Maxim presented his work related to terahertz polarizers based on chiral structures. That participation was a good experience, which had given our colleagues a lot of new ideas for researchm as well as new friends from many countries.