When the students start a Facebook page in honor of your summer school class, you know the class was a success.
The 2009 Nanobiophotonics Summer School held at the Beckman Institute June 1-12 was such a success, co-organizers Gabriel Popescu and Nahil Sobh said, that students were asking if there would be a second school next summer.
“The response was overwhelmingly positive,” Popescu said. “We learned what the students enjoyed the most and also gathered some feedback for next time when we will know what to improve.”
“They really liked it and made many new friendships,” Sobh added. “They established their own social network on Facebook called Nanobiophotonics Summer School 2009. The students asked ‘will you have it next year?’”
That will depend on whether a grant proposal is successful but, based on interest and feedback regarding the first Nanobiophotonics Summer School, continued funding looks like a good possibility. Popescu said there were 120 applicants for 50 slots in the school, including applicants from 16 universities in seven different countries.
The school was sponsored by the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN), which is funded by the National Science Foundation. Sobh is a lead scientist at Beckman and the site-lead of NCN at the University of Illinois, which also operates the nanoHub, a Web-based resource for research, education and collaboration in nanotechnology. Popescu is a faculty member in the Bioimaging Science and Technology (BST) group at Beckman.
The school grew out of a discussion between Popescu and Sobh, with Beckman faculty member Umberto Ravaioli leading the way in garnering funding for the session, and fellow Institute faculty members Steve Boppart and Rohit Bhargava also serving as a co-organizers. In addition, Beckman researchers Scott Carney, Nicholas Fang, Brian Cunningham, and Marina Marjanovic gave talks during the school.
As evidence of the interdisciplinary and comprehensive nature of the school, Kimani Toussaint of Mechanical Science and Engineering and Logan Liu of ECE also served as co-organizers. In addition, the school included medical and business perspectives. It featured talks from two local physicians: Dr. Samir Sayegh, eye surgeon and Medical Director of the Eye Center in Champaign, and Dr. Krishna Tangella, pathologist and medical director of Christie Clinic Laboratory. Donald Barnhart, a scientist with the iCyt company located in the Illinois Research Park, discussed optical design using the Optica software he developed.
Popescu said Beckman was a natural fit as a host site for the school.
“Beckman symbolizes interdisciplinary research on campus and this school was indeed highly interdisciplinary,” he said. “It was biology, nanotechnology and optics. We had students from various departments and lecturers from campus and outside. ”