The Boston University Photonics Center annual report 2015-2016

This repository item contains an annual report that summarizes activities of the Boston University Photonics Center in the 2015-2016 academic year. The report provides quantitative and descriptive information regarding photonics programs in education, interdisciplinary research, business innovation, and technology development. The Boston University Photonics Center (BUPC) is an interdisciplinary hub for education, research, scholarship, innovation, and technology development associated with practical uses of light.This has been a good year for the Photonics Center. In the following pages, you will see that this year the Center’s faculty received prodigious honors and awards, generated more than 100 notable scholarly publications in the leading journals in our field, and attracted $18.9M in new research grants/contracts. Faculty and staff also expanded their efforts in education and training, and cooperated in supporting National Science Foundation sponsored Sites for Research Experiences for Undergraduates and for Research Experiences for Teachers. As a community, we emphasized the theme of “Frontiers in Plasmonics as Enabling Science in Photonics and Beyond” at our annual symposium, hosted by Bjoern Reinhard. We continued to support the National Photonics Initiative, and contributed as a cooperating site in the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics (AIM Photonics) which began this year as a new photonics-themed node in the National Network of Manufacturing Institutes. Highlights of our research achievements for the year include an ambitious new DoD-sponsored grant for Development of Less Toxic Treatment Strategies for Metastatic and Drug Resistant Breast Cancer Using Noninvasive Optical Monitoring led by Professor Darren Roblyer, continued support of our NIH-sponsored, Center for Innovation in Point of Care Technologies for the Future of Cancer Care led by Professor Cathy Klapperich, and an exciting confluence of new grant awards in the area of Neurophotonics led by Professors Christopher Gabel, Timothy Gardner, Xue Han, Jerome Mertz, Siddharth Ramachandran, Jason Ritt, and John White. Neurophotonics is fast becoming a leading area of strength of the Photonics Center. The Industry/University Collaborative Research Center, which has become the centerpiece of our translational biophotonics program, continues to focus onadvancing the health care and medical device industries, and has entered its sixth year of operation with a strong record of achievement and with the support of an enthusiastic industrial membership base

Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach

Creativity Training for Future Engineers: Preliminary Results from an Educative Experience

Due in part to the increased pace of cultural and environmental change, as well as increased competition due to globalization, innovation is become one of the primary concerns of the 21st century. We present an academic course designed to develop cognitive abilities related to creativity within an engineering education context, based on a conceptual framework rooted in cognitive sciences. The course was held at \'Ecole Polytechnique de Montr\'eal (\'EPM), a world renowned engineering school and a pillar in Canada's engineering community. The course was offered twice in the 2014-2015 academic year and more than 30 students from the graduate and undergraduate programs participated. The course incorporated ten pedagogical strategies, including serious games, an observation book, individual and group projects, etc., that were expected to facilitate the development of cognitive abilities related to creativity such as encoding, and associative analytical thinking. The CEDA (Creative Engineering Design Assessment) test was used to measure the students' creativity at the beginning and at the end of the course. Field notes were taken after each of the 15 three-hour sessions to qualitatively document the educative intervention along the semester and students gave anonymous written feedback after completing the last session. Quantitative and qualitative results suggest that an increase in creativity is possible to obtain with a course designed to development cognitive abilities related to creativity. Also, students appreciated the course, found it relevant, and made important, meaningful learnings regarding the creative process, its cognitive mechanism and the approaches available to increase it.Comment: 10 page

Innovative teaching of IC design and manufacture using the Superchip platform

In this paper we describe how an intelligent chip architecture has allowed a large cohort of undergraduate students to be given effective practical insight into IC design by designing and manufacturing their own ICs. To achieve this, an efficient chip architecture, the “Superchip”, has been developed, which allows multiple student designs to be fabricated on a single IC, and encapsulated in a standard package without excessive cost in terms of time or resources. We demonstrate how the practical process has been tightly coupled with theoretical aspects of the degree course and how transferable skills are incorporated into the design exercise. Furthermore, the students are introduced at an early stage to the key concepts of team working, exposure to real deadlines and collaborative report writing. This paper provides details of the teaching rationale, design exercise overview, design process, chip architecture and test regime

Innovation in key stage 3

"The report; evaluates the extent to which the implementation of the revised curriculum is having a positive impact in schools; identifies case studies of innovative practice; and makes recommendations for further development." - introduction

Supporting strategic cultural change: The Strathclyde learning technology initiative as a model

This paper describes the strategies being developed at the University of Strathclyde in response to the vision in the Dearing Report of a learning society in which Communication and Information Technology (C&IT) is central to students' learning experiences. The Strathclyde Learning Technology Initiative aims to support strategic change in the development and use of new learning technologies to improve the quality and efficiency of teaching and learning within the University. In order for a major cultural shift in teaching and learning to take effect there are three main areas that need to be addressed: (i) many academics still work within a traditional teaching framework and believe that these methods can simply be transferred to the Web, (ii) students who have been taught in a traditional teaching environment need support in acquiring new learning skills for an electronic learning environment, and (iii) new methods of learning and teaching can only be successfully integrated within the environment of a supporting infrastructure and institutional climate. These key elements are further explored, drawing on the lessons learned from the implementation of the Initiative, and suggestions are made for ways of surmounting the barriers to the uptake of C&IT perceived by academics