Because of the rapid development of techniques for biomedical applications, the multidisciplinary aspect of the field, and the need for input from clinicians on medical applications, a large and focused conference on biomedical optics, such as the 2006 Biomedical Topical Meeting, plays a critical role in making progress in the field. The broad topics for the conference include both research efforts on technologies, such as diffuse optical imaging and optical coherence tomography, and in application areas, such as neuroscience and cancer. This meeting allows transfer of technology, methods, and lessons learned in clinical translation both across technology areas, between technology and application, and between applications.
Intellectual Merit:
In order for the above noted advances to occur, our future students need to be trained in multidisciplinary fields and also taught to develop skills to collaborate with people from different backgrounds. This means bringing physical science and biological science students together, giving them opportunities to be informed about other disciplines, and finding ways to convince students to break out of the discipline-specific boundaries in which they often find themselves. This meeting is designed to meet those needs.
Broader Impact:
The meeting will provide exposure of students to a very active multidisciplinary field, allowing them to see how their educational training can lead to the benefits for society. Such exposure helps motivate students to pursue careers in science with resultant benefits to scientific knowledge and technical benefits to mankind. The meeting itself will help advance the field through sharing of results, methods, and initiation of collaborations. The multi-disciplinary nature of the meeting will provide cross-fertilization of concepts and techniques between fields with the resulting synergies obtained from such interactions.
