KNOF relies on people first and foremost, hence why meetings have always been our most important activity. Beside meetings with top scientists, we also organise social meetings, movie nights and group city hangouts.
Joint meeting with Optical Student Association in Stockholm
Our alumna – Natalia Kuk, who is now doing a PhD in the Trapped Ion Quantum Technologies group at the Stockholm University, established a new Optical Student Association. We organized a joint meeting of our organizations to share our experiences and discuss future activities. This casual meeting was a great and…
Meeting with dr Michał Parniak – “Processing quantum information with atomic ensembles”
On Wednesday, 2nd of March, we met with dr Michał Parniak who is leading the Quantum Optical Devices Laboratory at the University of Warsaw. Michał presented efforts from his lab at implementing quantum information processors using an ensemble of cold rubidium atoms – applied to generating entanglement, quantum spectroscopy, and…
James Webb Telescope Launch Party
To celebrate the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope we organized a board game and pizza party. We chose the date of the JWST reaching the L2 orbit on the 26.01.2022. Due to COVID situation the event was held both in person and online. The main point of the…
Neon Museum with Nanorurki
Sometimes it’s good to reminisce, especially in times of social apocalypse. On 04.10.2019, we went together with a friendly chapter “Nanorurki” to the Warsaw Neon Museum. The museum focuses on presenting Polish light ads, but you can also find references to foreign culture. About the fact that everything ended colourfully,…
KNOF Annual Meeting 2020
On 8th January all our members gathered for the KNOF Annual Meeting – a time to reflect on the previous year and choose a new Board for the upcoming year. 2019 Board was stepping down and summarized the previous year, highlighting the most important achievements, like the EPS Leadership Meeting…
Career Paths in Photonics and Securing Research Funding
On 27th November we were hosting meeting with Gabrielle M Thomas, a winner of the very prestigious Marie-Sklodowska Curie Actions (MSCA) Individual Fellowship (IF), 2019 Ambassador of the Optical Society and now an innovation manager at M Squared. She shared her personal journey and experience of selecting a career path as well as some tips and resources useful for our own careers. Some of the most valuable things we’ve learned are ways of being more active in specific field of interest and building our own network. During workshop our guest guided us through the process of writing grant proposals and securing funding. She provided us with elaborately detailed requirements and pointers to pay attention to while writing for grants and scholarships. What was extremely interesting to understand and discuss was her very own MSCA IF proposal. Thank you all for great meeting!
Meeting with Michael Freeman
On November 13th and 14th, Michael Freeman from Washington University, Fulbright Scholar in Spain, taught us how to visualize our data, ideas and workThe meeting and workshop called “Visualization Concepts: using data to explain complex topics” showed us, when seemingly simple ideas are difficult and tricky to present; and the…
Visualization: from data to (un)informative image
It’s hard to imagine a career, which completely doesn’t need making some data understandable. In the world where information is everywhere, it is necessary to represent it properly, if we want to be heard and understood. That’s why the talk about data visualization given by Bartosz Borucki from the ICM UW, was indeed useful and interesting. We’ve learned a lot about some principles and tips helping with representing data better. Especially the talk was focused on frequent mistakes which can not only complicate the understanding of certain information but even distort it.
Science with WOW! – meeting with Tomasz Rożek
The star of our first meeting in 2019/2020 was doctor Tomasz Rożek – one of the most popular science communicators in Poland. Aside from his PhD in Physics, he also has degree in Journalism, both at University of Silesia in Katowice. He wrote several popular science books and articles. He…
Life’s a pitch – after meeting
Spotkań rozwijających umiejętności miękkie ciąg dalszy – tym razem dr hab. Piotr Wasylczyk uczył nas, dlaczego w prezentacjach naukowych warto chociaż odrobinę się wyróżniać, jak nie marnować czasu publiki, oraz czym jest slajdocentryzm i czemu tak groźne jest jego wyznawanie. Dziękujemy dr Wasylczykowi za cenne porady, a uczestnikom za liczne…
Can the tissue be a lens?
Kolejne spotkanie naszego Koła przybliżało uczestnikom zastosowania optyki w medycynie i biologii. Prof. Maciej Wojtkowski, renomowany naukowiec zajmujący się obrazowaniem biomedycznym, opowiedział o swoich badaniach prowadzonych w jego zespole Optyki Fizycznej i Biofotoniki w Instytucie Chemii Fizycznej PAN. Wykład odpowiedział nie tylko na pytanie tytułowe, ale i opowiedział o różnych…
Physics and what next?
Pierwsze spotkanie KNOF z serii rozwijającej umiejętności miękkie już za nami! Dr Anna Szkulmowska – naukowiec na UMK w Toruniu i prezes firmy AM2M – przeprowadziła inspirujący wykład “Physics and what next?”. Czy po fizyce można zostać jedynie naukowcem? Jakie umiejętności pracodawcy cenią u fizyków? A jakich nam najczęściej brakuje?…
OSA & ISE conferences
Podczas tegorocznych wakacji członkowie KNOF uczestniczyli w międzynarodowych konferencjach podczas których budowali sieć kontaktów z przedstawicielami zagranicznych kół naukowych zajmująch się szeroko pojętą optyką i fotoniką. Piotr Węgrzyn uczestniczył w dwóch wydarzeniach odbywających się w Waszyngtonie, DC. Podczas OSA Student Leadership Conference Piotr brał udział w trzydniowycm intesywnym programie wydarzeń…