2nd Canterbury Conference on Optical Coherence Tomography

Magalie BONDU, Sophie CAUJOLLE, Catherine CHIN, Felix FLEISCHHAUER, Michael MARIA

6^th – 8^th of September

All attendees in front of the Rutherford building (conference location)

The Applied Optics Group of the University of Kent organised the 2^nd Canterbury Conference on Optical Coherence Tomography (2CCOCT) with emphasis on broadband optical sources from the 6^th to the 8^th of September. 2CCOCT was an international conference with a total of 49 oral presentations and 10 poster presentations. Speakers came from all over the globe, covering countries like Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Romania, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Switzerland. The 49 oral presentations are divided into 13 student presentations, 15 invited speakers, 2 industry forums and 19 established researcher presentations. The conference was split into 13 different sessions, each covering a different area of research regarding broadband sources and / or imaging such as optical coherence tomography. The conference was sponsored by Image Guided Therapy Network UK Network (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), NKT Photonics (Denmark), Superlum (Ireland), the University of Kent, Santec (Japan), Thorlabs (USA) and the Marie Curie actions. The OSA Student Chapter of the University of Kent also participated throughout the conference with a variety of different events. They organised a social event on Wednesday evening for all conference participants, a student social event on Thursday morning and rewarded three early stage researchers for their excellent presentations.

All the UBAPHODESA students presented some of their work throughout the conference days. Sophie’s presentation was titled “Assessing embryo development using swept source optical coherence tomography”, Michael’s presentation title was “Analysis of supercontinuum noise for shot-noise limited detection in ultra-high resolution optical coherence tomography at 1300 nm”. Catherine’s presentation had the title ”Polarization extinction and noise characterization of a commercial supercontinuum source”. Magalie’s presentation title was “Compact multispectral photoacoustic microscopy and optical coherence tomography system using a single light source for tissue imaging” and Felix presented work with the title “Impact of absorption in the top layer of a two layer sample on spectroscopic spectral domain interferometry”.

from left to right: George Dobre (supervisor at the University of Kent), the 5 UBAPHODESA students: Felix Fleischhauer, Michael Maria, Catherine Chin, Magalie Bondu and Sophie Caujolle, Adrian Podoleanu (supervisor at the University of Kent)

This conference was of great quality. The topics covered were highly relevant to our PhD research. During the three days we had the chance to interact with many researchers. Several valuable open discussions took place, receiving useful guidance for our future career. We had as well the chance to show our labs and demonstrate experiments to our visitors.

The UBAPHODESA students would like to thank all participants of the conference and especially congratulate, Sophie Caujolle  (3^rd)  from the University of Kent and NKT Photonics, Mikkel Jensen (2^nd) from the Technical University of Denmark and Danielle Harper (1^st) from the Medical University of Vienna for winning the best oral presentation prizes.

Winners of the best oral presentations, prize organised by the OSA Student Chapter from the University of Kent. From left to right: the three judges: Mike Everson (President of the OSA Student Chapter), Magalie Bondu (Vice president of the OSA Student Chapter), Frederique Vanholsbeeck (external judge from the University of Auckland), Danielle Harper (1^st prize), Mikkel Jensen (2^nd prize) and Sophie Caujolle (3^rd prize).