Nobel laureate Donna Strickland to Inaugurate Cusat International School of Photonics Silver Jubilee Celebrations

KOCHI:
The International School of Photonics, CUSAT will be celebrating its’ silver jubilee this year and will be inaugurated on 25 th of February at 7.30 pm by Nobel prize winner Donna Strickland, said Prof. Pramod Gopinath, Director, International School of Photonics.

Dr. Strickland will be delivering a lecture on the topic ‘From nonlinear optics to high intensity laser physics’. Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo, Canada and had been awarded the Nobel prize in Physics in the year 2018 along with Dr. Gérard Mourou for the ground-breaking invention of chirped pulse amplification technology in the year 1985.

Founded in 1995, the School of Photonics is continuing to leap ahead by spreading its wings into different novel and exciting domains of Photonics, at par with International standards. The department currently offers 5 year integrated MSc and 2 year M.Tech in (Optoelectronics and Laser Technology) courses with a strength of 100 and 36 students respectively. It also has a strong research wing with 40 PhD and 5 Post-doctoral Fellows.

The School is supported by Department of Science and Technology (Govt. of India) under the DST-FIST Programme and has one of the best laser laboratories in the country. In 2002, University Grants Commission (UGC), Govt. of India, identified it as a Centre of Excellence in Lasers and Optoelectronics Sciences.

The department has been involved in research collaborations with various esteemed research institutions within India and abroad. Currently, there are MoU with University of Gothenburg, Sweden and ENSSAT, University of Rennes, France, for collaborative research and student exchange. One of the major collaboration was with the Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands which was supported under the MHO program offered by the Dutch government to ISP. The total project outlay during the first phase was about NLG 2 million for the period of four years.

The National Photonics Symposium held at the school annually, with the aim of bringing together leading scientists, academicians, industrialists and young researchers working in various realms of Photonics will, this year, be organised as an “International Conference on Recent trends in Photonics”, in connection with the silver jubilee celebrations. The conference will showcase talks by several distinguished scientists from around the world including Prof. Robert Bingham from Science and Technology Facility Council, RAL, CLF, UK, Prof. Antonello Andreone from the University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy, Prof. Ebrahim Karimi from the University of Ottawa, Canada, Prof. Arvinder Sandhu, from the University of Arizona, USA and many others. This would pave a platform for the researchers of the school to have active discussions with scientists of International acclaim, hoping to develop their ideas farther and deeper. In addition to the conference which is being planned from the 27 th of February to the 1 st of March, the school is also organising an International Webinar series featuring eminent scientists such as Prof Robert Boyd, the pioneer of non-
linear optics and Prof. John Costello, laser plasma physicist.

The school inspire young research minds through innovative programs, by providing them a global arena to unveil their scientific creativity. Details can be obtained from http://photonics.cusat.ac.in