The biannual Biomedical Optics Topical Meetings (BIOMED for short), organized by the Optical Society of America (OSA), is the premier meeting in the area of biomedical optics both in breadth and depth. Since the very first meeting in 1994, these meetings have grown in size from a few tens to over 500 attendees, and the majority is graduate students including female and other underrepresented students. Most of the technical sessions at the BIOMED meeting are relevant to the mission of quite a few programs at NSF.
The meeting offers a unique opportunity for the biomedical optics community to share the exciting state-of-the-art technological developments, stimulate new ideas, learn new challenges and directions, and explore/promote new collaborations. The meeting also offers an effective platform to educate our students, future scientists and engineers in multidisciplinary fields and facilitate them to develop skills of collaborating 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.
We requested funding from the NSF to support the 2012 OSA Biomedical Optics Topical Meetings (BIOMED), held in Miami, Florida on April 29-May 2, 2012. The $8,000 requested was distributed to undergraduate and graduate students and to distinguished plenary speakers to partially defray travel costs. This support allowed us to further two of our primary goals: 1) Establish best student posters and encourage students from different disciplines and cultures, including minority and underrepresented populations to participate in the conference and present; and 2) Recruit top-notch international experts in biomedical optics and related areas to deliver plenary talks. Rapid advances in physics, optics, and optical engineering in the past a few decades provide unprecedented opportunities of understanding, generating, manipulating and utilizing light. Biomedical optics, which utilizes photons in the visible and near infrared spectral range, has been emerging as a new field, offering new optically based technologies to fill the gap in biomedical diagnosis where conventional imaging modalities (such as X-ray, MRI, PET and ultrasound) are not effective. The emerging biomedical optics technologies are complementing and can potentially replace some of the traditional imaging techniques that use higher energy sources such as x-rays, gamma rays, or those that require strong magnetic fields in many biomedical applications. With lower energy requirements, such devices will provide structural and functional information with fewer side effects and at significantly lower cost. These emerging optically based technologies offer new contrast mechanisms which can potentially gain improved sensitivity and specificity for 3D functional and structural imaging of the body, brain, and tumors non-invasively. New high-resolution technologies are being developed, capable of assessing tissue pathology at true histology resolution in vivo and in situ in a noninvasive or minimally invasive fashion. In addition to diagnosis, light can (and has) also be used a therapeutic tool as in tissue ablation, hair removal, and nerve stimulation etc. Improved optical techniques may revolutionize the way that research and medicine is performed in the next 20 years, just as the MRI has made similar advances over the last 20 years. The meeting provided exposure to a very active multidisciplinary field with direct applications today, allowing students 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 helped advance the field through sharing of results, methods, inspiring of new ideas, and initiation of collaborations. The interdisciplinary nature of the meeting provided cross fertilization of concepts and techniques between fields with the resulting synergies obtained from such interactions. The meeting offers a unique opportunity for the biomedical optics community to share the exciting state-of-the-art technological developments, stimulate new ideas, learn new challenges and directions, and explore/promote new collaborations. The meeting also offers an effective platform to educate our students, future scientists and engineers in multidisciplinary fields and facilitate them to develop skills of collaborating 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. The Meeting Proceedings are available to the public online, here: www.osa.org/osaorg/media/osa.media/Meetings/Archives/2012/BIOMED-2012-Archive.pdf
