Optics at ICTP: Bringing Light to Students from the Developing World

Joseph Niemela

The Abdus Salam ICTP-UNESCO, Italy

It is a great honor to contribute to this SPIE Field Guide as a tribute to John Greivenkamp, whom I always admired for his ability to chair difficult meetings that would have sent others scurrying away, and for getting to the point quickly and often (not, unfortunately, like what is about to happen here).

First: A little known fact is that I started out as a graduate student in optics but was lured away early-on to a low-temperature group with the promise of a trip to Europe. I was “easy,” I know. Ironically, while I eventually moved to Europe and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP-UNESCO) in Trieste Italy, I also ended up being lured back into the wonderful world of international optics, largely due to people like John Greivenkamp and one particularly persuasive person at SPIE who also introduced me to The Clancy Brothers…

In Trieste, in fact, I have had the good fortune to work closely with major optics organizations within our Trieste System Optical Sciences and Applications (TSOSA) board. TSOSA provides critical advice, oversight, and support for ICTP-UNESCO’s many programs in optics education and training, and in particular the annual ICTP Winter College on Optics, which brings together many students and young researchers each year from dozens of countries in the developing world. The students learn about new trends in optics, but, just as importantly, can network with both lecturers and peers, and obtain a reprieve from often-discouraging scientific isolation. As a number of the countries represented in the College invariably have strained or no diplomatic relations, it also serves to support diplomacy through science. This isn’t the sort of diplomacy practiced by foreign service professionals; rather, it is related to the building of mutual respect that comes from the close engagement of scientists and/or students from different countries, religions, and cultures in a common discovery process. The same concept applies at CERN, which was built on the premise of uniting the continent of Europe after it was torn apart by two world wars, and SESAME, which aims to unite the Middle East: SESAME scientists from different countries that are sometimes in conflict work together on a common goal and with a common passion—coming to a better understanding of one another not from the sharing of knowledge, but from the creation of it together.

Concerning the ICTP Optics Colleges, it is difficult to imagine a similarly concentrated collection of nationalities, where just about everyone is from someplace else. The students learn together, socialize together, and stay in contact through social media groups for years. And some fraction of them later will take leadership positions in their countries. This year, the College is being held entirely online for the first time, and it has been (it is going on as I write this) a fantastic learning experience. While personal relationships and understanding naturally face a larger impedance mismatch, it is abundantly evident that knowledge flows surprisingly easily over the fiber optic cables that connect us.

To help ignite the interest of younger students in science, the UNESCO Active Learning in Optics and Photonics program has reached well over 1000 physics teachers from over 60 developing countries to provide pedagogical updating on the teaching of optics and photonics in the first years of undergraduate and high school levels. The aim is to provide a better conceptual understanding of how light works using inquiry-based or active-learning techniques. The program has received generous base funding from SPIE for many years, and further support from other optics organizations including Optica and ICO.

Finally, at the early career professional level, the SPIE-ICTP Anchor Research program in Trieste has helped many highly selected young researchers from developing countries accelerate their career journeys, starting in Trieste. A few have used the experience to prepare successful grant applications for setting up low-cost, high-impact laboratories in universities where none had existed before. They all are self-starters and incredibly inspirational.

The ICTP Winter College on Optics: Applications of Optics and Photonics in Food Science, 2019.