Spring 2016 Meeting of OSAPS, University of Dayton
The 2016 Spring Meeting of OSAPS was held at the University of Dayton on Friday, April 8th and 9th. This meeting was also a joint meeting with the Southern Ohio Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). The theme for the meeting was “Nanophotonics II”, with the II referencing the last time UD hosted an OSAPS meeting in 2005 with the theme “Nanophotonics”.
Friday was the kickoff of the meeting, which started with a student mixer sponsored by the UD chapter of Society of Physics Students. Approximately 18 students enjoyed a free pizza lunch, and Prof. Willie Rockward, National President of Sigma Pi Sigma, gave a talk on careers in physics. In the first plenary session, UD Provost Dr. Paul Benson gave a warm welcome to our fellow scientists, and then Dr. Ronald M. Reano from The Ohio State University gave an exciting talk titled, “Corralling photons: controlling light in optical waveguides on the chip-scale”.
The second plenary session featured UD’s own Prof. Joseph Haus, who continued the theme with “Optics with metals: Novel and future developments”. Next, the students took the spotlight with the poster session, which featured 31 posters on a wide range of physics topics. The Friday agenda ended with an excellent banquet dinner with 98 attending, followed by a well-received (but decidedly nontraditional) talk by UD’s Prof. Robert Brecha titled “Let’s talk about religion, politics…and physics”.
The meeting continued on Saturday, starting with the contributed talks, most of which were presented by OSAPS students. We had five parallel sessions featuring 26 talks, including one joint session with AAPT that was focused on physics education. Additionally, AAPT held a memorial session, hosted by Dr. Gordon Aubrecht from Ohio State University at Marion, celebrating the contributions of Prof. James F. Sullivan, who was a retired faculty member from University of Cincinnati.
The final plenary session of the meeting featured two speakers. First, Prof. Natalia Litchinitser from the University of Buffalo presented an excellent talk titled “Complex light in linear and nonlinear complex media”. Our final plenary talk was given by Dr. Tim Bunning, Chief Scientist of the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate at Air Force Research Laboratory. His talk titled “Nanophotonic activities within AFRL/RX” highlighted many of the research efforts at AFRL over the past decade.
The OSAPS Spring 2016 meeting had 117 attendees total. Many of these were students or faculty from colleges and universities around the Ohio Region, but there were also a number of attendees who are retired or work in industry. This diversity in attendance demonstrates the impact that OSAPS has regionally and gives the students opportunities to connect and network with people outside their normal sphere of influence. Overall, the OSAPS 2016 Spring Meeting was a great success, and we look forward to seeing you at the next OSAPS meeting!
Chair: Assoc. Prof. Mo Ahoujja, Ph.D.
Assistants: Assist. Prof. Jay Mathews, Ph.D., Prof. Emeritus Perry Yaney, Ph.D.