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1. Elected Officers

President: Anshuman Singh, anshuman.singh@icfo.es

Vice‐President: Luis José Salazar Serrano, luis-jose.salazar@icfo.es

Secretary: Paola Mantilla Pérez, paola.mantilla@icfo.es

Treasurer: Enrique Sánchez Bautista, enrique.sanchez@icfo.es

2. Current Chapter Members:

Federica Beduini

Valeria Rodriguez Fajardo

Carmelo Rosales

Esteban Bermudez

Ana Belen Sainz

Monica Marro

Luis Martinez

Venkata Ramaiah

Kavita Devi

Enrique Sanchez Bautista

Michael Geiselmann

Jan Gieseler

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Ion Hancu

Vito Giovanni Lucivero

Paola Mantilla Pérez

Jordi Morales-Dalmau

Silvana Palacios

Elsa Passaro

Amit Prasad

Luis Salazar Serrano

Anshuman Singh

Jiri Svozilik

Claudia Valdes

Benjamin Wolter

Can Yao

ALUMNI: Giovanni Volpe, Anita Gharekhan, Noam Kinrot, Giorgio Volpe, Majid Ebrahim-

Zadeh.

3. Activities during August 2012 – August 2013

3.1 Weekly Seminar

The members of ICFO‐SPIE student chapters organize a series of seminar every Wednesday

at our institute ICFO.

The speakers are mainly PhD Students and Post‐doctoral researchers, as well as

undergraduate students, professors at ICFO, and visitor scientists. To encourage students to

attend seminars, we offer some soft-drinks and snacks.

List of the speaker and their topics are mentioned in the following table:

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Date Speaker Topic

10.10.12 Carmelo Rosales ‘A New Type of Light with Optical Chirality’

24.10.12 Jan Gieseler ‘Subkelvin Parametric Feedback Cooling of a

Laser-Trapped Nanoparticle’

21.11.12 Simon Wall ‘Measuring and Manipulating Solids on Ultrafast Timescales’

05.12.12 Adrian Batchtold 'NEMS Resonators Based on Carbon

Nanotubes and Graphene'’

14.12.12 Aydogan Ozcan ‘Lensfree On-Chip Microscopy and

Tomography Toward Telemedicine

Applications’

01.16.13 Michela Badioli ‘Coupling between Graphene and Nearby

Emitters: Efficient Photodetection and Tunable

Plasmons’

10.04.13 Michael

Geiselmann

‘Three-Dimensional Optical Manipulation of a

Single Electron Spin‘

08.05.13 Ion Hancu ‘Magneto-Electric Antennas for Directed Light

Emission’

29.05.13 Robert Sewell 'Quantum Non-demolition Measurement with

Ultra Cold Atoms'

21.06.13 Sofía Rodríguez ‘High-Speed 3D Printing for Micro- and

Nanofabrication’

17.07.13 Klaas-Jan Tielrooij ‘Efficient Conversion of Light into Hot Electrons

in Graphene’

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3.2 Monthly ICONS meeting

To organize the activities of the ICFO-SPIE student chapter, we meet up to discuss upcoming

activities ranging from outreach to inter-chapter exchange meetings. Usually this is held

during the first week of every month with a treat of pizza. It’s a common platform for the Ph.D.

students to come up with new ideas for recruiting more people and to make aware of the

ongoing activities. Any future outreach activities either to schools or for pre university

students will be discussed and a separate protocol is recorded about the theme and outcome

of the meeting.

3.3 International Food Festival in November 2012.

As every year, ICONS organizes a food festival where the idea is to taste food from all over

the world. Researchers from different countries get together forming groups to cook for the

rest of participants.

2012 had a high participation with 8 teams divided like this: Eastern Europe and Russia,

Iranian, Japanese, Mediterranean, Mexican, Colombian, New Zealand and Indian.

After a vote of the participants, the winner was the Mexican team and second was the

Mediterranean team.

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3.4 Visits to Research Infrastructures and Industries

In a combined initiative, ICONS and KTT decided to organize visits to out-standing Research

Infrastructures and Industries.

In January 2013 we visited Hewlett Packard (HP) in Sant Cugat (Barcelona). There, they

develop new technology for plotters and big scale printers. At the beginning they gave us a

talk explaining about the mission of the center. Afterwards, they showed us a lot of the

different materials in which HP can print on. Also they took us to different test rooms where

they make quality test of their machines, including temperature, humidity and mechanical

tests.

The visit was a success, counting with the assistance of many PhD students and postdocs.

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3.5 Social Friday

In order to encourage the relationship of the ICFO-SPIE student chapter with the PhD

students and other colleagues, and for the recruitment purposes, we set up this Social Friday,

where we encourage people to join this activity for talking while enjoying a drink and a snack

together.

3.6 El Día de la Luz (The Day of Light)

‘El Día de la Luz’, the day of light in Spanish, is our educational outreach activity to teach the

basics of optics mainly to local high school students between 16‐18 years, who come to our

institute with their teachers.

We introduce optics to the students through presentations and demonstrations of basic

examples of optics such as polarization, wavelength, color, energy conversion, reflection and

refraction. For this, we use practical demonstrations in which the students can also

participate.

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Furthermore, they experience how light is useful for our daily life, for example how light will be

converted to heat by a radiometer, or also to electricity by a solar cell; students are also

introduced to optical telecommunications by showing them how information is transmitted

through optical fibers.

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3.7 Science Workshop for Young Minds (September 2012)

Science Workshop for Young Minds was a full time activity organized by ICONS in

collaboration with KTT from ICFO. During the workshop, selected high-school students came

to ICFO to learn about optics by listening to professors talks, lab tours, playing with light

experiments and going to magic shows where at the end optical phenomena was the

explanation. The scientific activities where intermixed with leisure time activities to keep the

students receptive. For this workshop the participation of a big team of students from the

chapter was necessary, and at the end the result was a group of students very satisfied and

enthusiastic about optics.

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3.8 ICONS attended the conferences of SPIE

ICONS attended the annual SPIE Student Chapter Leadership Workshop in San Diego,

California on the 24th of August of 2013. Besides, we financially supported other student

members to attend other conferences in Europe.

3.9 Recruitment activities: Volleyball tournament

ICONS organized a volleyball tournament in July 2013 as a way to interact with ICFO

students that are not members of the student chapter and encourage them to participate in

our activities.

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3.10 Travelling lecturer (December 2012)

Aydogan Ozcan. Topic: Lensfree On-Chip Microscopy and Tomography Toward

Telemedicine Applications. In his lecture, Aydogan Ozcan introduced new imaging and

detection architectures that can compensate in the digital domain for the lack of complexity of

optical components by use of novel theories and numerical algorithms to address the

immediate needs and requirements of telemedicine for global health problems.

Among these activities we organized, the funding was requested for

3.1 Weekly Seminars

3.2 Monthly ICONS meeting

3.3 International Food Festival

3.4 Visits to Research Infrastructures and Industries

3.5 Social Friday

3.6 El Día de la Luz

3.7 ICONS conferences support

3.8 Recruitment activity: Volleyball tournament

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The funding was spent in the following manner:

3.1 Weekly Seminars

$250: Refreshments (chips, cookies, drinks)

3.2 Monthly ICONS meeting

$400: Refreshments (pizzas and drinks)

3.4 Visits to Research Infrastructure and Industry

$300: Transportation

3.5 Social Friday

$400: Refreshments (chips, cookies, drinks)

3.6 El Día de la Luz

$300: Educational outreach activities for local high school, optics education kits and

demonstration setups.

3.7 ICONS conferences

$350 support to students to attend student conferences

3.8 Recruitment Activities

$200 for T-Shirts, flyers, posters

Total expenses: $2200

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4. Upcoming Events

1) October: International Food Festival

This is an annual activity held among ICFO-SPIE student chapter. Due to the international

environment in ICFO, students and researchers cook in different groups elaborating special

dishes from their own country.

This event improves the communication among the institute's researchers, and also is a good

opportunity for recruitment for the student chapter.

2) November: ‘Futbolin’ tournament: Different groups of competitors will take part in this

exciting competition. This hobby lives up students´ time in the institute, and strengthens bond

between them.

3) November: ‘Light of night’: A group of students are invited for an optics tutorial regarding

telescopes and image formation and then in a practical session they try to see targets with

telescopes.

4) Guided tour for Young Science Bloggers: The activity consists in a guided lab-tour

around ICFO for a small group of science motivated young students, either in high school or

first years of their careers.

5) Industry visits

6) From October onwards: Local Outreach Programs

7) Professional development programs for PhD students: ICONS poster competition,

workshops by expert students on different scientific tools

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5. Financial details

Starting balance

$125 Balance from previous year 2011

$1100 SPIE activity grant

$1000 from ICFO

Total $2225

Expenses

Total $2200 as described on Pg. 13

Remaining balance

$2225 – $2200 = $25