This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 13128, including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, and Conference Committee information.

Monroe Community College (MCC) is a cornerstone in delivering technical education and training, crucial for meeting the demand for proficient optics technicians in the industry. Additionally, MCC offers an affordable route for students aiming to pursue bachelor's, master's, or PhD degrees. Through its 2+2 programs in partnership with the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, and University of Arizona, MCC facilitates a seamless transition to higher education. Typically, only an opportunity available for four-year students, MCC has partnered with the University of Rochester to establish paid research experiences for community college students. These research experiences allow community college students to contribute to measurement and manufacturing tasks for research projects, participate in meetings, and forge valuable connections with the research team. Such experiences not only provide MCC Optical Systems Technology students with a unique entry point into research groups, but also equip them with the confidence, purpose, and experience to excel in their academic and professional journeys, while addressing industry's call for technical skill combined with practical experience. This paper describes how Monroe Community College’s Optical Systems Technology department has partnered with the University of Rochester to establish a paid research program where community college students conduct research alongside bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD students.

The NSERC CREATE training program on New Technologies for Canadian Observatories (NTCO) has been a unique collaboration between academia, government, and industry to advance innovation in astronomical instrumentation while fostering knowledge exchange as part of an advanced student training program. Through strategic partnerships and funding support, NTCO facilitated the creation of industrial internship opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students in physics, astronomy, and engineering, enabling them to gain valuable professional experience while making high impact contributions to cutting-edge research projects. The NTCO program included nearly 200 supervisors (a third in industry) working together to successfully bridge the gaps between academia, government, and industry, through 70 industrial internships (37 graduate, 33 undergraduate) over the seven-year duration of the program. This paper will outline the key activities and outcomes of the NTCO program, ranging from our strategies in recruiting a diverse group of students and matching them with appropriate industrial internship experiences, to the benefits of advanced summer school training, peer support, annual general meetings, and professional skills development courses for our participants.

MICROSCOM is an Erasmus Mundus design measure project awarded by the European Commission to establish a two-year International Master’s programme in Advanced Microscopy with Artificial Intelligence (MICROSCOM), what is called Erasmus Mundus Joint Master (EMJM). The EMJM MICROSCOM programme will be the first of its kind to comprehensively address all aspects of the computational microscopy field, including a thorough understanding of microscopy principles, methods, and techniques, as well as software and hardware development and integration. It will also cover the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and edge computing, along with practical projects focused on real-world problems. The EMJM will be administered by a consortium of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) from Ireland, Spain and the United Kingdom, in conjunction with international partners from academia and industry who possess specialized expertise to oversee MSc thesis.

The continuing shortage of trained optics technicians has become a bottleneck for the precision optical manufacturing and assembly industry. The Optical Systems Technology (OST) program at Monroe Community College (MCC) has engaged with its industry partners to clarify the scope and timescale of training that will best address industry needs for qualified personnel. New modalities of instruction have been implemented to reduce the amount of time that employees and potential new hires are required to be at campus facilities to acquire core technical skills. In this paper, we present learnings from condensed laboratory training and plans for microcredential offerings to accelerate the certification process for optics technicians. These modalities have been applied to optical physics and manufacturing coursework.

Over the past few years, some work has been done to develop a curriculum for teaching quantum technicians. One challenge centers on the concept that there are multiple fundamentally different technologies involved in many of the applications. These include different approaches to quantum computing, communications, and sensing. Technician training, like for laser and optics technicians, typically have been completed in two years or less at local community colleges, with associate degrees being the top-level credential available. Other shorter programs lead to certificates in the specific area of training. An umbrella concept that emerged from a QED-C workshop three was that creating awareness of introductory quantum topics for students in adjacent technology programs, like lasers, optics, nano, and microelectronics could be implemented by adding one or more quantum courses to these programs, based on the requirements of local industry, academic and government laboratory needs. Continuing to build on these efforts, this paper highlights some details of a few programs as examples to provide models for other programs to use in their local communities. One key concept addressed is how to recruit students to these programs from the local communities and recommendations to help guide program development for new entrants to the field.

Overview of findings and outcomes is presented from several symposia on Quantum Education as well as from most important journal publications in this field including the author's own experience at the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester and 2023 ETOP special symposium supported by the Institute of Optics. Seven topics will be covered, namely: (1) easily understandable and affordable experiments with single and entangled photons; (2) how to teach the formalism of quantum optics in the age of quantum computing and communications and how much mathematics is needed; (3) how to improve students’ learning, especially for large enrollment, and how to evaluate what the students learned; (4) curriculum development: how to elicit average students’ interest; (5) training quantum optical technicians; (6) K-12 education, outreach activity, and games devoted to “quantum”; (7) engagement of non-STEM majors.

An overview of the optics outreach activities conducted under the banner of Active Learning in Optics (ALO), a self-funded program established in January 2016, will be provided. This initiative operates under the umbrella of both Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). In past nine years 75 outreach activities in various educational institutions, focusing primarily on public sector girls' schools, colleges, and universities have been successfully coordinated. The outreach activities conducted aim to bridge educational gaps and promote the understanding of optics, especially among female students. Towards the conclusion of presentation, I will briefly elaborate on the establishment of the Pak-ICTP Alumni Society in January 2021. This initiative was conceived to effectively reach undergraduate and graduate students during the challenging times of the Covid-19 pandemic. In past three years, PIAS organized 40 online scientific talks, including the Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg lectures series, by eminent scientist from ICTP and around the globe.

Montréal is home to over 100 companies and six universities with photonics activities that drive regional economic development. This paper provides an update on the Montréal Photonics Networking Event, an annual meeting heading into its’ 8th edition in 2024. The event’s stated mission is to build a collaborative environment for the development of student researchers, with the ambition to facilitate research synergies and connect with the industry to showcase research and career opportunities. Since 2015, online and in-person events have taken place, with a measured growth of 50% year-on-year, a cumulative reach of 600 participants, and the establishment of 30 partnerships with industry, photonics student chapters, research clusters, and socio-economic development partners. The event is coordinated by a network of volunteer students and professional's representative of the attendees and collaborators. Activities, promotional material, and marketing strategies to create audience engagement before, during, and after the event will be presented, along with lessons learned to enable peer-to-peer development online and in person across multiple academic research institutions.

Two decades ago, in the beginning of 2002, we decided to organize a graduate school in the field of biophotonics and biomedical optics. The purpose of the International Graduate Summer School Biophotonics is to provide education at the highest international level for postgraduate students and early career stage researchers. The school always experienced higher interest than the number of students we can accommodate, illustrating the needs it continues to fill in the field. Apart from learning from renowned lecturers and scientists, the international atmosphere in having about 80 biophotonics scientists from across the world for a week in a confined space, on the beautiful Island of Ven, makes networking opportunities phenomenally good. The school certainly has the potential to create lifelong friendships, and to help advance the field by exchange of ideas. We collaborate with the Journal of Biomedical Optics on publishing a special section (Selected Topics in Biophotonics) containing invited review papers from lecturers at the school and contributed papers from students at the school, respectively. They have been compiled into open access online teaching material.

Interdisciplinary capstone design projects are a required part of many of the engineering programs across the US and have been proven to be highly impactful for preparing students for industry. The University of Arizona College of Engineering program places five to six students on a team sponsored predominantly by industry partners. Over the course of the academic year, students work to meet the requirements of the industry sponsor and ultimately present their results at a celebratory event called Design Day. The authors have been students, mentors, and now sponsors of projects through BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace). This paper describes our general philosophy to designing a great project that will challenge and grow the students on the team and give them a taste of what work at our company is like. The paper will give several example projects across the past years to showcase what went well and what can be improved, as well as summarizing general roadblocks students consistently experience for other mentors to be aware of.

Digital Holographic Microscopy (DHM) has become a powerful diagnostics tool for the sciences, especially biology. In addition, DHM has great potential for use in education because it is so flexible and affordable to schools and students. For many years, the cost and complexity of producing and using holograms limited their use to a narrow range of industry and science. Digital holography has removed these limitations making holography affordable and available to anyone who has a laptop computer. Affordable digital holocameras entering the market can enable teachers and students to produce and view their own holograms, reconstruct and view three dimensional images, and better understand and use holography in research. This paper describes such a system including exercises and experiments that explain how holograms are made and how they are used to record and analyze dynamic events that take place in three dimensions. MetroLaser’s “Holoscope”, is a lensless, DHM that produces holographic videos of microscopic objects distributed in a relatively large volume. Each frame in the video is a digital hologram that encodes 3D images that can be focused and viewed, plane by plane in detail. The three-dimensional images encoded in the holograms are electronically reconstructed, scanned, and viewed with sharp images coming in and out of focus on a computer monitor as we scan through the volume. By providing micrometer resolution throughout a cubic centimeter volume, the system effectively freezes time at the moment each frame was recorded and enables precisely tracking the 3D movement of microscopic objects in space and time. The ability to view each hologram in real-time, shows directly how interference between an object and reference wave produces interference fringes that become the hologram. Software provided with the system enables the viewer to automatically perform all of the necessary operations from hologram recording to 3D wavefront reconstruction and plane by plane imaging. We also describe more advanced and more expensive DHMs with even higher resolution that are now also available for scientific research.

All fields will be affected by the arrival of ChatGPT and other highly advanced generative artificial intelligence models, which show us just how brilliantly tasks can be reproduced by these engines. It is therefore natural to ask how the teaching of optical engineering, and in particular optical design, is and will be affected by this phenomenon. In this paper, we report on how, over the last five years, I have modified my introductory and advanced classes in optical design. Using a few examples, I'll try to show the positive points but also the impacts of using tools like LensNet. Finally, I'll conclude with some thoughts on what may or may not lie ahead, and how we can introduce these new technologies into the training of future optical system designers.

Over the past year, the authors have been editors on a special section of the SPIE peer-reviewed journal Optical Engineering focused on education and training of a global workforce in optical instrumentation and lens/illumination design. In this presentation, we seek to provide an overview of the selected papers in the special section and discuss the highlights of optics education innovation occurring at academic institutions around the world.

This work presents a simple and automated educational resource with the aim of determining the wavelength of a laser source that uses the Airy disk generated by a circular aperture. It is known that there is a relationship between the diameter of the central disk and the distance between the circular aperture and the image plane. These two parameters are automatically measured by using a machine vision sensor and an ultrasonic distance sensor, respectively. This resource can be applied in graduate or undergraduate Physics and Engineering laboratories and classrooms for educational, demonstrative, or measuring purposes.

A community outreach event was hosted at the University of Southern California in collaboration with SEDS-USC (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center to share the excitement of the mission development of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. The objective of this event was to help students understand the engineering and science collaboration needed for NASA projects. This event is a model for informal educational experience at the university level. This unique workshop brought together astronomy, physics, and engineering students to explore and define trade studies between the possible science objectives and engineering capabilities of HWO. Students were able to connect, learn, and be a part of shaping the future of space exploration.

Students and faculty of the Optical Systems Technology Program at Monroe Community College have developed and deployed a narrative-based, mobile color science laboratory for public STEM outreach in the greater Rochester, New York region. The laboratory consists of a series of experimental demonstrations designed for hands-on self-exploration and guided instruction by trained optics students and outreach staff. Visitors to the lab learn about the hidden color world of white light and how different light sources generate color differently. Participants leave the classroom with a greater understanding of how illumination sources and imaging displays create the color present in their daily lives. Each experiment is designed to be robust, easily transportable, quick to assemble on any standard table, and safe for interaction by people of all ages. To date, the color science laboratory has been deployed at both on-campus and multiple, high-profile, off-site events, reaching several thousand members of the general public and inspiring the next generation of STEM students.

A synchrotron accelerator consists of a storage ring in which electrons remain in a circular orbit at speeds close to that of light, while emitting the so-called synchrotron light, a highly collimated broad-spectrum beam of radiation. Tangentially to the accelerator’s storage ring are the beamlines, the experimental stations that collect the emitted synchrotron radiation and use it to illuminate samples in experiments that cover several areas of knowledge. The beamlines have a series of optical elements responsible for managing the beam properties (i.e., energy, photon flux, size, divergence, resolution, polarization, etc.), providing a beam with the characteristics required for the given experimental technique. This work shows the design of a beamline scale model developed at Sirius, the Brazilian synchrotron light source, intended for teaching physics. The scale model was named ROLINHA, a common bird in Brazil, following the pattern of Sirius beamlines, which are named after animals and plants from Brazilian fauna and flora. ROLINHA aims to illustrate in a didactic way how a real beamline works, using visible light. It uses an LED lamp as source and glass lenses, mirrors and a prism as optical elements, to allow the selection of different wavelengths (colors) for the focused beam. ROLINHA had its first version built in 2023 and has been used for several Sirius scientific outreach events, benefiting visitors, students of different ages, teachers and researchers. The optical design of the scale model, the automation of the components and its functionalities will be presented here in detail.

The present paper is understood as a short manuscript to a graphical poster. It is a follow up to a recent paper on a project in arts and science with the privately owned Museum of Future in Berlin and the Foundation for German-Polish Cooperation, which was celebrating 100 years of Kaluza's 5th Dimension in a geographically distributed interactive hybrid exhibition. The co-operation was continued and became inspirational for the students of a new master's degree program in electrical engineering. In the first group of students several student papers were involved in and inspired by our projects and delivered input. Two master's theses in progress are directly linked to the arts science topics. We demonstrate the surprisingly motivating effect of art projects on design and choice of topics by students, especially working part-time students.