Between October 29 and November 10, the Photonics Society at UCSB held its third annual Women in Photonics event, a week of events promoting Women in Engineering and Science! This year, we held a total of five events for the UCSB, Goleta, and Santa Barbara communities, and hosted an international visitor. We sent local scientists to give talks at local K-12 schools, hosted a lecture given by Dr. Caroline Lai from Rockley Photonics, and hosted two Nanofab tours led by the women who work there.

​​We organized a tour of the UCSB nanofabrication facility on Saturday November 3rd from 1 - 3 pm led by female UCSB graduate students and local industry professionals for November 3.

Tours were led by:
Paula Heu of Innovative III-V Solutions
Cheyenne Lynsky from UCSB Solid-State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center
Victoria Rosborough from the research group of Prof. Jonathan Klamkin

Tour leaders showed attendees how to gown up in a bunny suit before walking them through the facility. Tours covered the various tools and techniques used in a cleanroom, as well as the many types of devices that are fabricated in the UCSB cleanroom.

In collaboration with women scientists and engineers from Freedom Photonics--a local photonics company--we organized an event at Freedom Photonics’ facility on October 30 from 3:30 to 5:00 pm. This event included a tour of the nanofabrication facility, a short lecture on photonic applications, the career paths of the Freedom Photonics scientists and engineers, and several hands-on activities including a demonstration of a handheld infrared camera, a DVD spectrometer activity, and the principles of photolithography using sidewalk chalk and stencils.

Above: Aligned stencil patterns from Freedom Photonics’ photolithography activity.

On Friday, November 2 and Friday, November 9, the Photonics Society organized talks at local middle schools by women graduate students in photonics-related fields at UCSB. In these talks, the graduate students discussed their work, their interest in science, and their educational paths through college and graduate school.
 
Dr. Caroline Lai from Rockley Photonics in Pasadena came to speak to photonics graduate students on Thursday, November 8. She spoke about Rockley Photonics’ history and gave a technical overview of the range of technologies on which the company works. She concluded by touching on her career thus far and the importance of having female mentors. 

Rockley Photonics' Vision of In-Package Optics for the Future of Datacenter Networking
Abstract: Rockley Photonics is a silicon photonics company based in Pasadena, CA, that is a fabless supplier of silicon photonics chipsets, IP, and custom designs for high-volume optics applications. One of our goals is to enable in-package optics to create an optical switching solution for datacenter network applications. In this seminar, I will give an overview of Rockley Photonics, outlining our core technology platform and key strengths.

Above: Dr. Caroline Lai from Rockley Photonics speaks at UCSB.

On Saturday November 10, female members of the Photonics Society participated in the annual I HEART STEM  conference. The conference was jointly organized by the UCSB Women’s Center and Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) student organization and is intended to encourage high-school-aged young women to pursue STEM fields when they enter college through hands-on STEM workshops and a keynote address about the difficulties they may face as a woman in STEM. All attendees and workshop facilitators were women. The Photonics Society led a hands-on workshop where attendees explored different optical phenomena such as polarization and color perception.

Above: Photonics Society Secretary Victoria Rosborough leads participants in an activity at I HEART STEM

Finally, this year, the Photonics Society hosted an international visitor for Women in Photonics Week. Miki Igarashi is a general science communicator in Japan. In addition to hosting her own YouTube science channel and running science education outreach events for children, she is a graduate student at the University of Tokyo studying science communication with a focus on women in STEM. We invited her to observe I HEART STEM workshops and talks. In addition, some members of the Photonics Society visited MOXI, The Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation, in downtown Santa Barbara with her as well as to find inspiration through the exhibits and demonstrations for our own photonics-related educational outreach activities. She wrote a blog about her experience with I HEART STEM and MOXI on her website. Finally, we gave her our color-mixing activity (available through the FUSE website) with instructions that we had translated into Japanese with the help of a UCSB Japanese-American student. We plan to send her our other educational outreach kits with translated instructions later in the academic year. 

Above: From left to right, a student volunteer, Miki Igarashi, and Photonics Society President Takako Hirokawa after I HEART STEM 2018.

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​Dr. Ken-Tye Yong
Director of the Bio Devices and Signal Analysis (VALENS)
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

Nanomaterials have been applied in healthcare applications such as cancer imaging, lymph node mapping and brain diseases therapy. These nanomaterials can be engineered to serve as a platform for challenges in highly sensitive optical diagnostic tools, biosensors, and guided imaging and therapy. The versatility of nanomaterials may provide the keys to improve diagnostics and therapy of human diseases. In this talk, we will highlight the use of nanomaterials with different sizes, compositions, and shapes for nanomedicine applications. This talk is intended to promote the awareness of past and present developments of nanomaterials in biomedical fields, the potential toxicity of nanomaterials, and the approaches to engineer new types of safe nanomaterials, whereby encouraging researchers to think about exciting and promising biophotonic and nanomedicine applications with nanomaterials in the future.

​The past decade has seen accelerated progress in III-V semiconductor infrared photodetector technology. The advent of the unipolar barrier infrared detector device architecture has in many instances greatly alleviated generation-recombination (G-R) and surface-leakage dark current issues that had been problematic for many III-V photodiodes.   Meanwhile advances in a variety type-II superlattices (T2SLs) such as InGaAs/GaAsSb, InAs/GaSb, and InAs/InAsSb, as well as in bulk III-V material such as InGaAsSb and metamorphic InAsSb, have provided continuously adjustable detector cutoff wavelength coverage from the short wavelength infrared (SWIR) to the very long wavelength infrared (VLWIR).   The confluence of these developments has led to a new generation of versatile, cost-effective, high-performance infrared detectors and focal plane arrays based on robust III-V semiconductors, providing a viable alternative to HgCdTe (MCT).