• Technical Conference:  05 – 10 May 2024
  • The CLEO Hub: 07 – 09 May 2024

Tuesday and Wednesday at CLEO

By Arti Agrawal


I meant to write a blogpost yesterday but because I was up too late talking to some new people I met at the conference, I didn’t. But that is not too bad as we may explore working together on a new problem!

To me the highlight of Tuesday was the Women in Photonics Lunch that had two very high profile speakers: Prof. Michal Lipson of Cornell University and Dr. Hong Liu, principle engineer at Google Technical Infrastructure. These ladies gave very frank and honest insights into their career paths, the challenges they have faced specific to them being female and their advice for women in general.

When Michal said that people at times assume she works for Alex Gaeta, her husband and also a professor at Cornell, but never the other way round, it produced a wave of a laughter and nods of recognition at what so many women face: being talked over at meetings, being mistaken for the secretary etc. The sub-text or unspoken messages that women are given, of their careers being secondary to their male partner’s or colleagues were all realities that many present in the room could empathise with and perhaps you can too as you read it.

Their advice which works for both women and men contained some real nuggets. For example, “don’t put yourself down because the people around you do that to you”. This action of not internalizing the negative messages from those around us sounds very simple but can be very profound. They also advised everyone to set a high personal standard for oneself. Achieving to a high standard then means we feel more confident and feel we belong and deserve the success that we will hopefully achieve!

Here is an abrupt left turn!

I can’t end the post without talking a little bit about the great talk by Ayman Abouraddy from CREOL, Florida, who gave an invited talk Wednesday morning. He discussed in a very simple and engaging manner the challenges with making multimaterial chalcogenide fibers. He then went on to explain how using polymers in the process his group had overcome these challenges to fabricate large index difference, small diameter, robust fibers with low bend loss. It wasn’t that the Science being explained was necessarily completely new to me, but a good review of the field coupled with very accessible explanations of the challenges and their solutions was valuable. A 30 minute talk allowed me to walk away feeling I have a good handle on the latest on the field of mid IR fibers. So time well spent!

Posted: 14 May 2015 by Arti Agrawal | with 0 comments

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