If you are interested in collaborating with us for an outreach initiative, please write us an email !!. 

"Only Light can do that"....on the road

We have crafted a set of activities which we can tailor for kids 6-15 years old following three principles: 1) non-experts can quickly acquire basic skills; 2) the learning process relies on hands-on exercises; 3) there’s an immediate connection between learned concepts and real-life applications where those concepts are applied (e.g. smartphones, cameras, DVD, LCD). Kids pop balloons with lasers, build their own cameras, learn how the eye works and inspect glasses for tiny defects. We are partnering with youth organizations in the DC areas and the Howard County library system to expose as many kids as possible to the wonders of light.

SPIE Education outreach award

We developedhands-on activities (5 for elementary schools; 5 for high schools; 3 for community college students) with a common theme: students build  optical instruments on their own starting from basic components. We want students to recognize how much of everyday technology is driven by photonics and be able to understand how such technology work. This is why students will make “replicas” or “building blocks” of cool technology (e.g. microscopes, spectrometers) with their own hands starting from zero. 

Harvard-MIT Summer Institute for Biomedical Optics

A long tradition of the Wellman center for Photomedicine (Giuliano's former home) is the Summer Institute of Biomedical Optics organized in collaboration with the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) program. The Summer Institute is an NSF REU site since 2014 under the direction of Prof. Yun. While at Wellman, Giuliano served as Deputy Director for the Summer Institute. Giuliano is still connected to this great initiative by serving as external member of the board of the Institute and by lecturing/judging within the program. 

The Summer School's objective is to inspire talented undergraduate students to pursue a career in science and engineering. During the summer, the students are involved in three main activities: - a lecture series in biomedical optics; -a research experience within one of the labs of the Wellman Center; -professional development with proposal, presentation, poster preparation guided and judged by Wellman scientists. All participating students are accommodated within the MIT campus, receive weekly stipends, and participate in various peer group activities.

 For more info and details on the application, please visit the Summer institute website.

Ambassadors of Knowledge Program (Italian Ministry of Research)

In 2013, the Italian government announced a request for proposals of outreach initiatives for undergraduate students involving foreign scientists A) to expand their curricular background knowledge and B) to provide them with a research experience abroad. Within this call, Giuliano proposed and got funded for a program in Photonic Technologies for Biomedical applications articulated in three phases:  

- a BioPhotonics "Boot Camp" in Italy composed by  a 10-hour lecture series in biomedical optics; and a 15-hour hands-on experience in experimental biophotonics.   

- a two-month experience in the USA as part of the Harvard-MIT Summer School in Biomedical Optics.

- a dissemination period in Italy, where the students in the program would share their experience by permanently implementing as teaching assistants the biophotonic experiments of the original boot camp as well as new experiments learned while in the US.

The program was a success thanks to the collaboration with and thorough implementation by Prof. M. D'Angelo at the University of Bari. 26 students participated, two of them were selected for the Harvard-MIT Summer School, and now they are back in Italy putting italian taxpayers' money to work!