Hello OSSC Members and Friends,
Welcome to my OSSC March Letter. I hope you can attend our March meeting at Caltech to enjoy the friendship of your fellow OSSC members and other guests. This event will be held at the Cahill Building, home of their world-famous Astronomy Department, where we will hear from Roger Smith & Jason Fucik about their work on a Cryoscope: A Cryogenic Infrared Survey Telescope in Antarctica. As the weather has been excellent recently and should continue to be, we will have our meal on their patio out back and then convene inside to their Hameetman Auditorium for a short bit of OSSC business updates and the presentation.
On Tuesday March 10th, our friends at Optica Silicon Valley will host their Winter Event; a live in-person and online event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA from 2:45 – 5 pm. This will include a Discussion Panel: AI in optics R&D and Production, a talk on Transforming Photonics: Fully Integrated Engines for AI, Quantum, and Beyond and another talk on System-Aware Simulation Workflows for Co-Packaged Optical Architectures. All the details links to register are available on the OSSC website homepage.
The OFC Conference will be held the week of March 15-19 at the Los Angeles Convention Center and I am sure many OSSC members and friends will be in attendance. The link to this event is also on the OSSC website homepage. I will be attending on Sunday afternoon for a “Workshop: Do We Need to Rethink the Role of Networks in the Quantum Era?” and Monday afternoon for the “Demo Zone”. Then I will be back another day (TBD) for the exhibits. It seems sure to be a very well attended conference that I hope you will attend.
At the end of March, the UC Irvine Division of Continuing Education will begin its Spring courses that include:
Geometrical and Physical Optics
Introduction to Lens Design
Optical Systems Engineering
Introduction to Radiometry: The Propagation and Measurement of Optical Radiant Energy
If you are interested in adding to your skill set, please do consider these very successful courses and perhaps consider starting one of the certificate programs. Many OSSC members have been through these courses and programs and you can receive an OSSC Member Discount of 15%.
The Laser Technology courses at Pasadena City College started a new cohort in mid-February, so if you are interested, please contact Dr. Brian Monacelli, more information is available on the OSSC website homepage.
Now that we are over halfway through our OSSC 2025-2026 academic year, our Board and Committees have been working on ways to improve how we serve our members and the Southern California Optics Community. One topic you may notice, starting with our March meeting at Caltech, is that we will not be live streaming the meeting and presentation. We will attempt to record the guest speakers’ presentations and then post them on our website for our members to view after the meeting. While we appreciate the people who have frequented the live streamed presentations, currently our ability to continue to offer this service is limited and takes away from engaging with the people that are live and in-person. We are seeking a person that can attend the meetings live and in person to focus on the technical details of setting up and making sure that all the pieces are in place to live-stream seamlessly. Please let us know if you would like to help with this service.
Our Membership & Finance Committee has also been working behind the scenes to streamline some of our processes including how we accept payments by check. Since the OSSC does not have a physical location where someone receives mail daily, we have decided to no longer accept checks via mail. This is due to the expectation that checks sent in by mail to cover dues and other financial obligations might not be processed for up to two months, depending on when our OSSC Treasurer has time to go to the mail box, receive the mail, deposit the check and send the information to our Membership Chair for processing via our website to update the transaction. This delay has caused some members to be inconvenienced because their checks and membership updates do not appear quickly enough. We will continue to accept checks at our in-person meetings, because they can be deposited in real time via a bank app on the Treasurer’s cellphone and then the Membership Chair can update the OSSC website during the meeting. In general, it is better to process payments via our OSSC website using a credit card. Then your transactions happen in real-time and you can verify the entire transaction right away.
A new Credit Policy has also been approved by our Board and states: “Credits expire at the end of the program year following the year they have been issued with a grace period of three month (Expiration on 9/30).” An example of this policy is: “Credit issued at the next meeting (March 2026) expires on 9/30/2027 (6/30/2027 + 3 months grace period).”
We will continue to review our policies and procedures and will listen to our members regarding these decisions. One additional policy we are currently discussing is about people that register to pay for dinner at a meeting and then do not show up. The OSSC routinely works with our caterers to get the correct number of meals for our dinner guests, and we constantly update the number as more people register near the meeting date, after the late fees are already in place. The Board will look at requiring dinner guests to register no later than 5 days before the event to reduce the stress on our Board members who navigate this process.
Wishing You Well on your Optics Journey, and Hoping to see you soon at an OSSC meeting or event,
Donn Silberman
OSSC President 2025-2026