Welcome back to the UK. Here are some pictures taken from sunny Hampshire.
Hampshire
Tag: Cycling
Boulder wrap-up
Boulder has been great. I hope you saw the pictures and my post about my visit to NIST.
Last Thursday I had a mini industry day. I started the day with coffee with David Giltner, product manager at Zolo technologies, and who I, and the University of Southampton Optics and Photonics Society, have invited to Southampton to give a talk to try and answer the question “Can a scientist find a rewarding career in industry?” That’ll be on September 13th, stay tuned!
I followed up with a visit to Vescent Photonics in Golden. They, amongst other things, help take scientific ideas and make them into products. They are doing some really exciting work on packaging lasers, and I talked about some of the work that fellow PhD student Stephen Lynch is working on.
On Friday I visited the University of Colorado Boulder. Their OSA-SPIE chapter showed me around their labs. They are working on some really cool stuff, including portable LIDAR systems for remote sensing in water (see Rory holding his portable system below), optical filters (think light) that you can tune with acoustic waves (think sound) for spectroscopy imaging, and silicon photonics for light-based computing. It was great to meet the chapter, who organised for me to present my research. I also caught up on Monday to present the outreach kit I am touring.
Scientists and engineers love acronyms. Who can guess what ARSNL and SQUIDS stand for?
Here they are:
ARSNL: Active remote sensing lab
SQUIDS: Superconducting quantum interference devices
It’s not all people though. What’s kept me from writing here has been writing up two papers that I will be presenting at the SPIE Optics Education and Outreach conference that I’m attending in San Diego at the end of the month. Last week was spent writing in every possible break and 12+ hours day at the weekend. Thankfully I have a brilliant group of co-authors to review my words, and it was all submitted by Monday.
I felt like I deserved a break on my last day in town and headed out for a bike ride. It was a glorious day, pushing my body and bike up over the top of mountains. Super happy to have ridden to above the 3,000 metre mark. The descent was totally worth it though, as was the beer and pizza after!
Next up is Toronto. Hope you can tune in. You can now subscribe to updates to not miss any of my posts or gallery updates.
Thanks again for following!
Colorado
West Canadian Highlights
I’m leaving Canada and felt like I should reflect on the highlights from this first stage.
Presenting at an international conference and doing outreach there was great. Super pleased with the quality of the talks I heard and discussions I had. My talk was recorded by the Optical Society as an added bonus, although with restricted access to members.
Driving through British Columbia and Alberta is a must if you like a road trip. The scenery was beautiful; I hoped you enjoyed the pictures! I should have set up a selfie booth in the car to capture the moments shared on the road with Anna, Peter, Flintstone, Tim, Xavier and Diana.
Kelowna was an awesome place. The cycling was amazing, and the atmosphere of the town super friendly. Eternally grateful to Tim for letting me crash at his for a few days. On my list of places to check out in winter.
Giving a talk on my research and life as a PhD student in Southampton for the University of Calgary’s Student Optics and Photonics Society was a great experience, as was the added bonus of visiting loads of cool research labs.
Finally, there were some unexpected reunions along the way. Great to catch up with Shanghai-Fudan-buddy Wayne and his girlfriend Louise in Vancouver, and bump into Eleonora and Federico from the Grenoble Nanotechnology Class of 2013 in Vancouver and Banff!
Next up is Boulder, Colorado in the USA. Thanks for reading. Watch this space for more research and adventures.
Cycling & exploring
