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During his PhD research in photonics, Benjamin has successfully shown the important opportunities carbon-based materials such as diamond and graphene offer for integrated nonlinear devices. As in electronics, also in photonics the aim is to develop very compact components that are fabricated on a chip.

SPIE student chapter at Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) successfully organized the annual 'Light Night'. For this years’ edition the focus of the 'Light Night' was 'Photonics: Choices Today, Chances Tomorrow'. With this theme, we took a closer look at the advantages of having a Photonics background, explored how we can take smart career decisions and how to solve problems in academia and industries effectively and efficiently.

OSA is granting the optics and photonics community free access to a collection of the most downloaded articles in this topic area over the past year from Applied Optics . The article "Freeform optical design for a non-scanning corneal imaging system with a convexly curved image" resulting from the research of our VUB B-PHOT Postdoc Researcher Yunfeng Nie is among those most downloaded papers.

The Bootcamp Photonics for Bachelors is an initiative that originated from the feedback we received from students and from industry. What is photonics all about? Is it very specific and limited or is it exact the opposite holding unlimited opportunities? Why has the European Commission proclaimed Photonics as a key enabling technology for the 21st century?

The bright blue colour of the Cyanophrys remus butterfly has its origin in the unique periodic nanostructures in its wings, which are called ‘photonic crystals’. For more than two decades, engineers in Photonics technology are trying to understand the operation of such photonic crystals.

Today students and researchers from VUB B-PHOT Photonics Research at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, are presenting the Science Show Photonics at the first “International Day of Light” (#IDL18) at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris.

VUB B-PHOT researcher Lien Smeesters is one of the five promising researchers selected for for the yearly EOS Pipet prize.

In the domain of Illumination Optics and Optical design controlling the propagation of light is key. Game-changing features are compact size, highly efficient light collection at low production costs.

Today physicians are still severely hampered by the lack of precision of the needle tip location during a biopsy. Looking at lung cancers, 25% of the diagnoses suffer a false negative outcome through traditional biopsy methods.

The Open-Innovation Photonics pilot for North West Europe (OIP4NWE) aims to drastically reduce high R&D costs and time for SMEs in the field of photonics. A significant decrease of the defect rate in pilot production and a shorter throughput time can help establish a thousand integrated firms within a decade.

The global market in photonics is poised to grow to 615 billion EUR by 2020. Europe is the world second-biggest supplier of photonic products after China, creating 1 million new jobs by 2030 according to the new vision paper “Europe’s age of light ” published by Photonics21.

More than 200 persons from industry, universities and research centres celebrated the 10^thanniversary of Belgian Industrial Research & Development (BiR&D) in the Palace of Academy on March 20^th , 2018, in presence of His Majesty the King, Minister Muyters and Minister Marcourt.