Center for Optical Technologies to hold seventh open house Oct. 13-14

All-day workshops on energy applications for solid state materials and on advanced biophotonic imaging techniques will highlight the Seventh Annual Open House of Lehigh’s Center for Optical Technologies (COT) on Monday, Oct. 13, and Tuesday, Oct. 14.
The event, to be held in the Rauch Business Center, will also feature presentations by two dozen national experts, free tutorials and a poster session.
Two speakers will give invited presentations on Monday: Lawrence L. Kazmerski, director of the National Center for Photovoltaics in the U.S. Department of Energy, and Thomas Armstrong, nanotechnology program manager with the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED).
The workshop on advanced biophotonic imaging technologies, which begins at 8:45 a.m. on Tuesday, will be cochaired by Fil Bartoli, Daniel Ou-Yang and Matthias Falk. Bartoli is the Chandler Weaver Chair of electrical and computer engineering, Ou-Yang is a professor of physics and codirector of Lehigh’s Bioengineering Program, and Falk is an assistant professor biological sciences.
Lehigh faculty who will give presentations at that workshop include Xuanhong Cheng (materials science and engineering), Svetlana Tatic-Lucic (electrical and computer engineering), Xiaolei Huang (computer science and engineering) and Dimitrios Vavylonis (physics).
The workshop on energy applications for solid state materials, which begins at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, will be chaired by Nelson Tansu, the P.C. Rossin Assistant Professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Faculty giving presentations at that workshop include Tansu, Slava Rotkin (physics), Sudhakar Neti (mechanical engineering and mechanics), Michael Stavola (physics) and Ivan Biaggio (physics).
Four 90-minute tutorials, beginning at 1 p.m. on Monday, will underscore the interdisciplinary nature of the COT’s research programs, which draw faculty and students from the departments of physics, electrical and computer engineering, biological sciences, chemistry, materials science and engineering, and mechanical engineering and mechanics, and from the polymer science and engineering program.
Jim Hwang, professor of electrical and computer engineering, will give a tutorial on “Microwave Characterization of Lightwave Components,” and Peter J. Butler, associate professor of bioengineering at Penn State University, will discuss “Biological Applications of Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting.”
Jeff Shakespeare of GlucoLight Corp., who holds a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from Lehigh, will give a tutorial on “Component Packaging in Optoelectronics,” and Selim Unlu, professor of electrical and computer engineering, biomedical engineering, and physics at Boston University, will discuss “Label-free Optical Biosensors: Applications in DNA and Protein Microarrays.”
The other presenters at the workshops come from UCLA, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, the University of Maryland, the University of Montreal, Penn State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Ohio State University, and from BD Technologies, Emcore, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The COT, launched in 2001, is a partnership of Lehigh, Penn State, Northampton and Lehigh Carbon Community Colleges, and the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania. One of the leading research institutions in its field, the center has received more than $80 million in funding, including major support from DCED, the U.S. Department of Defense, Lehigh, industry and private sources, and federal research grants.
COT’s mission is to advance the science and global application of optical technologies through industrial partnerships at the local, domestic and international level that drive growth and diversity in the industry while providing leadership in educating the next generation of Pennsylvania’s optics workforce.
Those wishing to attend the open house should contact Anne Nierer at (610) 758-2600 or aln3@lehigh.edu. A full agenda can be found here.
--Kurt Pfitzer