Photonics Ireland series returns with wide-ranging technical and industry program

Featured speakers from international industry and research institutes helped bring global perspective to the annual Photonics Ireland event last week. Hosted this year by Queen's University Belfast, the meeting included three days of invited and contributed talks, poster presentations and exhibits from several supporting organizations including SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Dates were 4-6 September.

Early in the program, SPIE CEO Eugene Arthurs spoke on "Growing Worldwide Photonics Activity."

Ronan Burgess, European Commission Deputy Head of Unit for Photonics, described some of the policy influences behind these projections represented by the Horizon 2020 research and innovation funding proposals and support for public-private partnerships. (Read the Thomas Skordas article on Horizon 2020 in SPIE Professional for additional background.)

Among other featured speakers were SPIE Members Michael Hochberg, Director of the OpSIS Institute and faculty member at the University of Delaware and the National University of Singapore; Nabeel Riza, head of the School of Engineering and chair professor of electrical and electronic engineering at University College Cork; and Rüdiger Grunwald, Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short-Pulse Spectroscopy.

Arthurs presented Best Student Paper prizes on behalf of SPIE:

• First Prize: Matthew McAuley (Queen's University Belfast), for "Optical hydrogen sensing using arrays of freestanding palladium nanotubes," M. B. McAuley, A. Murphy and R. J. Pollard
• Second Prize: Rui Zhou (Dublin City University), for "Phase noise suppression in injected gain-switched comb source for coherent optical communications," R. Zhou, V. Vujicic, T. N. Huynh, P. M. Anandarajah, and L. P. Barry
• Third Prize: Katarzyna Komolibus (Cork Institute of Technology and Tyndall National Institute), for "Study of ultrafast carrier dynamics in type-II GaSb/GaAs quantum dots by pump-probe spectroscopy," K. Komolibus, T. Piwonski, J. Houlihan, C. Reyner, B. Liang, L. Lewis, G. Huyet and D. L. Huffaker.

Eugene Arthurs presenting Best Student Paper prizes to Matthew McAuley (above) and Katarzyna Komolibus (below).