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Trip Highlights

Valery Tuchin, Saratov State University, Russia, visited four locations during his time in India. Travelling to Bangalore, Manipal, Kolkata, and Meerut, he had the opportunity to meet with researchers, students, and professors. He also gave a plenary talk at the 8^th International Conference on the Perspectives of Vibrational Spectroscopy. The successful visit revealed that the optics and photonics field there is interested in growth and enthusiastic for the future.

Zeev Zalevsky, Bar-Ilan University, Israel visited Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima. He gave presentations on optical super resolution and remote photonic bio-sensing. The feedback received from attendees was very positive. He also met with the OSA student chapter there and learned about the flourishing prospects of their future activities.

Rajesh Menon, University of Utah, USA visited Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) in Kerala, India. He gave the keynote lecture at the Indian Photonics Symposium 2019 and met with the OSA student chapter. He also attended the interactive poster session and a question and answer session where students could talk about their research and ask him questions about his talk. 

Kimani C. Toussaint, Jr, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA visited and gave presentations at two universities in Ecuador, one at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) and the other at the Escuela Politecnica Nacional (EPN). The fact that USFQ and EPN are well‐respected private and public universities, respectively, gave Professor Toussaint an excellent opportunity to gauge the state of optics research in the country. He met with an OSA student chapter, visited labs, and met with faculty. Everyone was very receptive to meeting an OSA Fellow and exploring ways in which optics researchers at their respective schools could collaborate with their counterparts at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign.

Domenico Bonaccini Calia, European Southern Observatory, Germany, visited the National University of Colombia and Sergio Arboleda University in Bogotá. He toured the observatories of these universities and spoke about recent discoveries in astrophysics and satellite communication technologies. He met with students and professors and discussed the possibility of a national solar telescope in Colombia as well as participation in a space weather global network.

Federico Rosei, INRS, Centre for Energy, Materials and Telecommunications, Canada participated in two workshops in Kigali, Rwanda—one on women in science and engineering and one on climate change. In addition, he visited the East African Institute for Fundamental Research (EAIFR) and gave two lectures. The first was a technical lecture on multifunctional materials for solar technologies and the second one was on professional development, focusing on writing papers for scholarly journals.

Po Dong, Nokia Bell Labs, USA, visited Zhejiang University in Hangzhou and Shanghai Jiaotong University in Shanghai, China. Dr. Dong delivered a few talks on the topic of “silicon photonics integrated circuits” and introduced the latest research development in this field and future research directions.  He met professors and graduate students who are working in the field of integrated photonics. He had a chance to meet OSA student chapter in Hanzhou. He also visited the labs and talked with some PhD students on their experiments.