The biennial International Graduate Summer School in Biophotonics held on the Swedish island of Ven on 8-15 June 2013 continued its tradition of great success as an event for education, scientific exchange and networking, organisers report.
The school is organised in collaboration with SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, which contributes substantial funding. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, through its Nobel Institute for Physics, also provides a substantial grant. Other financial support comes from the Danish Optical Society, NKT Photonics A/S, Lund Laser Centre and Thorlabs Sweden.
Launched in 2003 as a collaboration between the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and Lund University, the school has established the region as a lighthouse within biophotonics, said organisers Stefan Andersson-Engels from Lund and Peter Andersen from DTU. The event is designed to attract the best researchers as lecturers along with the best students, Andersen said. This year’s participants included 56 students from 19 countries and 11 lecturers from 5 countries.
Photo 2: Participants gathered on the Swedish island of Ven this month for the 6th biennial Graduate Summer School in Biophotonics.
Topics covered lasers and their application in medicine with lectures by:
• Kishan Dholakia (University of St. Andrews in Scotland) on “Optical micromanipulation for biophotonics”
• Wolfgang Drexler (Medical University of Vienna in Austria) on “Optical coherence tomography”
• Paul French (Imperial College London in the UK) on “Multidimensional fluorescence imaging and metrology”
• Stefan Hell (Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany) on “Nanoscopy”
• Steven Jacques (Oregon Health Sciences University in the US) on “Tissue optics”
• Konstantin Lukyanov (Laboratory of Molecular Technologies, Russian Academy of Sciences in Russia) on “Genetically encoded tools for optical imaging and control of cells and organisms”
• Eric Potma (University of California, Irvine in the US) on “Biomolecular imaging with coherent Raman scattering microscopy”
• Katarina Svanberg (Lund University Hospital in Sweden) on “Strategies for cancer treatment using lasers and photodynamic therapy”
• Roy Taylor (Imperial College London) on “Supercontinuum light sources and lasers”
• Bruce Tromberg (University of California, Beckman Laser Institute in the US) on “Medical imaging in thick tissues using diffuse optics”
• Lihong Wang (Washington University in St. Louis in the US) on “Photoacoustic tomography: ultrasonically breaking through the optical diffusion limit”
The participants said that the International Graduate Summer School in Biophotonics provides training in highly relevant topics.
The 2013 SPIE Poster Award went to Kari Vienola (Rotterdam Eye Hospital in the Netherlands). Kelsey Kennedy (University of Western Australia) and Idan Steinberg (Tel Aviv University in Israel) were runners-up. Posters are viewable on the event website, along with lecturers’ slide presentations.
Accepted papers from the school and review articles by Drexler and Potma will be published July 2014 in a special section in the Journal of Biomedical Optics entitled “Selected Topics in Biophotonics: Optical Coherence Tomography, and Biomolecular Imaging with Coherent Raman Scattering Microscopy.” Andersson-Engels and Andersen will be guest editors.
Biophotonics 2015 is scheduled for 13-20 June 2015. Lecturers and topics are listed online.
Photo 1: Kari Vienola won the SPIE Best Poster award at Biophotonics 2013. From left: Peter Andersen, co-founder and co-organiser of the school); Idan Steinberg and Kelsey Kennedy, runners-up for the award; Vienola; and Katarina Svanberg, past president of SPIE and school lecturer.
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