Hello OSSC Members and Friends,
Welcome to the OSSC June 2026 Newsletter. I hope you can attend our June meeting at the Holiday Inn LAX Gateway in Torrance to enjoy the friendship of your fellow OSSC members and other guests. This will be a very special meeting as we celebrate 75 years of service to the Southern California Optics Community. We will also be announcing the results of our 2026-2027 Officer Elections and inducting 4 OSSC members to Fellow status. We will have our OSSC Fellows Induction Booklet at this meeting (still passing out printed copies) that will also have information on the OSSC History and Formation and the OSSC History Project. Our ‘technical presentation’ will be “The History of the OSSC – A Panel Review and Discussion with Past Presidents and Fellows. Our Panelists will be OSSC Past Presidents Eric Ford (1992-1993), Susan Rico (1996-1997) and Reddy Chirra (2001-2002), and Scott Rowe (2011-2012) will be our Moderator.
We are asking: Other Past Presidents, Fellows and Members to submit their stories electronically as documents with photos and / or a video recording of their stories and experiences with the OSSC and Southern California Optics in general. Please use the form at the link below to upload your information. We will make time for a small number of OSSC people who have uploaded their information to share it briefly live during an “Open Mic” session at the meeting. OSSC History Project Submission Form. I believe we will have many people wanting to say a few words so please come prepared and let us know.
I’ll refer to my May 2026 Letter for some recent happenings in the local quantum world and workforce development areas, as I hope you will participate in some of these benefits the OSSC and our extended family offer. But now I will take a double dip back in time.
As many of you may know, this is my second time serving as OSSC President. I served as President during the 2007-2008 term and in May of 2008, we inducted five (5) esteemed OSSC members as Fellows. The current photo on the OSSC Fellows page is from the meeting. I am so honored to have Susan and Reddy still here with us and on our panel for our June meeting. I also ask you to take a moment to remember our dear friends who are no longer with us but have had such a positive impact on our lives and the lives of so many others. During those years past, the OSSC had a paper newsletter that we literally printed and mailed to all our OSSC members. We’ll have a few copies at the June meeting and a link to the May 2008 OSSC Images Newsletter at the end of this letter. In that May 2008 Images newsletter, I wrote a ‘From the President’ article and looked back in time to 25 years before that, when I graduated from the University of Arizona. This is the double dip I mentioned above.
Each one of us has our history, some longer than others, and some just beginning. For those of us who have been around much longer, it is our intention to be role models, as best we can, for those of you in an earlier part of your journeys. For that I am sure you can rely on us to do our part to help keep the OSSC growing stronger than ever.
Our OSSC Officers and Volunteers for the 2026-2027 term represent the next generation of OSSC leaders. I know the older group of OSSC Leaders are so proud of these new leaders and we have such faith in them that we know the OSSC will be in great hands going forward. We know this because many of them have served as Optica, SPIE, SPS and other student leaders during their time in school.
So, with that I will say ‘enough said’.
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