Graduate students Mite Mijalkov and Rania Sayed have returned from the 14th IONS (International OSA Network of Students) conference held in Torun, Poland, bringing home two of the meeting’s most important awards.
Mite won the Best Talk Award for his presentation “Sorting of Chiral Microscopic Swimmers Activated by Light” in the Quantum Optics section, while Rania received the Best Poster Award for her poster “Intracavity Optical Trapping with Feedback-Locked Diode Lasers,” also in the Quantum Optics section.
Mite also won a prize for the best talk at the 5th IONS conference in North America, held in Charlotte, North Carolina. He is a master’s student in the Department of Physics and a member of the Soft Matter Lab led by Dr. Giovanni Volpe.
Rania was a visiting scientist at the Soft Matter Lab for six months earlier this year; at present, she is finishing her PhD studies at Messina University in Italy.
IONS conferences are organized by the International OSA Network of Students and supported by the OSA (the Optical Society). The purpose of IONS conferences is to connect students from around the globe who are engaged in the study of optics and photonics.
IONS-16, which will take place in summer 2014, will be held at Bilkent and organized by the university’s OSA Student Chapter.