Ah sleep, how I love it so and yesterday the first day of Photon started with not much of it. After a 430am start and a first train at 545am we made it to Imperial College for the first day of Photon14!
Things kicked off, as they invariably do, with a plenary lecture. A plenary is basically a big invited talk that everyone should probably attend. Our plenary was given by Professor Sir Peter Knight (I bet that being Professor Sir makes filling in forms tedious) on quantum technologies. It wasn't really about the science behind quantum technologies, more the work Prof. Sir Knight had done to secure funding for the field and what the government might expect us to produce in the near future as a return on that investment. It was quite a refreshing opening plenary, but it did make me wonder who was involved in setting government expectations.
After the plenary, we broke up into different sessions, with various specialist themes. There wasn't much that directly related to my work, so I plumped for "Adaptive and Active Optics" because it was going to be about laser related stuff. I think I probably made the right choice as although I don't know if I'll use what I learnt. However, I'd say that I now have a greater idea of how adaptive optics work, mainly through using deformable mirrors which you can change the shape of to optimise your optics set up. As this session concluded the morning, it was time to see just how well photon was going to perform as a conference by sampling it's lunch offerings! Conference lunches are important ok! You need something to look forward to and it needs to get you through a very long afternoon. So, the food. It was average, although I don't know if that's fair as my bar was set by Italy and I don't honestly think anyone will ever beat that, but they should still try to! The buffet was a mix of standard university catering sandwiches and fruit, but there were some nice surprises in the form of mini-meat pies and mozzarella sticks. So I'd give it a rating of 2.5 out of 5, however, change could be afoot on Tuesday and Wednesday as that is when we require tickets to get our lunch!
After being fed I wen to a careers talk entitled "making the most of your early career". We were told at the start it wasn't a hard sell for the institute of physics and their careers services, but it definitely was. I basically learnt what booklets I should look at downloading from the institute's website and the other advice was highly generic. I wanted to know what would make me stand out! How to know what to choose! There was one thing I hadn't thought of and that was becoming a journal reviewer, but I think that's for post docs really. At least the next plenary was good, and signalled the start of stuff more important to me, with the speaker talking about imaging single cells in the eye using light microscopy. It was interesting, although it seemed most of the functional imaging relied on the use of chemicals or viruses to create contrast and it don't think doctors would be too happy with that.
The next 2 sessions were focused on biomedical optics, firstly looking at spectroscopy (in slightly different forms to what I do) and then clinical methods. I didn't get as much out of the first session as I had hoped, but the second section was great! There's some exceptional work going on to manipulate endoscopes to make it possible for them to be used as microscopes. This could mean that you just use an endoscope to look at a tissue sample, rather than doing a biopsy, or you could get a better biopsy. Even better in cancer surgery the surgeon might be able to check if a tumour was fully removed while surgery is still happening, rather than having to send off the tumour for analysis, a process which takes days. Therefore, people will only need to have 1 operation rather than 2 if not all the tumour is removed in the initial cut.
After dropping stuff off at the hotel we nipped back for the poster session and drinks reception, aka the networking session, but we won't call it that. To be honest I neither networked or read many posters, mainly as I did my round of the posters at lunch and I really didn't feel up for networking. The other networking barrier was the fact my supervisor wasn't there. At TERMIS one of my supervisors introduced me to a lot of important people in the field, but that opportunity wasn't open to me last night. Oh well, there's always tomorrow! If I survive my presentation that is...
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