-Good news this week, our NSERC application for an industry partnership grant with QPS Photronics (http://www.qpscom.com/) has been approved!   Our project, entitled “Concrete structure safety monitoring systems” will investigate ways to detect problems with large infrastructures before they lead to major damage and potential loss of human lives. See internship offer in an earlier post.

-Next week, Profs. Smelser and Albert will be travelling to Boucherville to attend a meeting to participate in discussions regarding Canadian participation in the proposed Global Environmental Measuring and Monitoring Network (GEMMN).  As promoted by Optical Society of America through its International Photonics Advocacy Coalition, this network will consist of Regional centers dedicated to bring together public and private decision-makers, environmental scientists, and technology developers to provide more precise and useful information needed to measure and address regional impacts of climate change (see the  OSA Fact sheet for more details).

-More excellent news:  our most recent paper by former student Tahseen Haque (supervised by Prof. Smelser, with contributions from PhD student Hamed Jafari and Prof. Albert) about his masters thesis results has been published in Applied Optics (Sample orientation in corona-poled multilayer silica structures)