INESC TEC organises international event in the Photonics area
From 27 to 29 June, the Faculty of Science of University of Porto (FCUP) hosted the 10th edition of the Symposium on Enabling Optical Networks and sensors (SEONs), which was organised by INESC TEC. As part of this symposium, the Portuguese Society for Research and Development in Optics and Photonics (SPOF) organised, in collaboration with INESC TEC and the IT-Aveiro, the first Summer School on Recent Advances in Optics and Photonics.
About 60 researchers attended the Symposium and the Summer School. The event was coordinated by Orlando Frazão, a collaborator at INESC TEC’s Optoelectronics and Electronic Systems Unit (UOSE). This technical meeting aimed to promote the exchange of ideas between academics and industry professionals working in Photonics. As part of this event, there were 30 papers presented in the form of posters and five oral presentations.
Discussing research and development in different fields of Optics and Photonics was the objective of the first Summer School on Recent Advances in Optics and Photonics, an area where there have been notable advances in Portugal over the last decade. The Summer School targeted students and included a series of lectures from professors coming from different countries, such as Sweden, the United States of America, Spain, Poland and Brazil, besides Portugal.
For the Organising Committee, both the Symposium and the Summer School were quite successful and productive. According to the Orlando Frazao, "this year we celebrated the 10th successful edition of SEONS and, as a result, the first Summer School on Photonics was born". For Manuel Costa, the president of the SPOF, "the research in optics has been evolving quite rapidly in Portugal. In addition to the conferences and activities we organise, we felt that it was important to involve students more. The students seemed very interested in this event, so we believe it was quite successful".
Katarina Svanberg, a guest speaker at the Summer School and medical science expert at the Lund University Hospital (Sweden), stated that she was “positively surprised with the high level of the presentations”, as well as with the “organising committee’s extraordinary effort to gather young researchers and scientists. This is very important because they are the future”. According to this expert, the Summer School provided “an excellent opportunity for them to learn a wide variety of subjects in this area”.
