With more than 60 attendees between in-person and online students, Prism Week received positive feedback from our attendees and guest speakers. A whole week dedicated to celebrating diversity and inclusion was not a trivial matter to plan, but our determined members of the Women in Optics (WiO) Club pulled it off once again.

Liam Frank is a physics PhD student in the College of Science, specializing in research housed in the Wyant College of Optical Sciences with Prof. Jason Jones' lab. However, Liam's talent extends beyond the lab and into the pool as a UArizona club athlete on the Club Water Polo team. For April Liam was named the Student Athlete of the Month! Congratulations, Liam!

Xiaoqin Elaine Li
Professor of Physics
University of Texas, Austin

I will discuss how different types of excited states, i.e. excitons and trions can be engineered in semiconductor moiré superlattices.  I will discuss two recent developments. One is the discovery of a charge-transfer trion resonance in twisted homobilayers. Another is to confine excitons in a semiconductor functional layer with twisted-hBN substrates. 

The month of March is Women's History Month, a time set aside to celebrate the contributions women have made throughout history in a variety of fields. Over the last few weeks, the Wyant College of Optical Sciences has celebrated a few of the many women in the sciences who have made significant contributions to our world. Take a moment to learn more about each of these women.

The first UArizona Museum Day was a huge success for all participating museums on campus! The Wyant College of Optical Sciences had its doors open from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. on March 23rd and saw many excited visitors interested in learning more about the mysteries and history of optical sciences. A special thank you to all the amazing volunteers who made this day possible!

Cristina Canavesi
Co-Founder and President
LighTopTech Corp.

Convolutional neural networks were applied to automatically segment the endothelial cells in human cornea for quantitative, unbiased assessment of corneal health. A novel algorithm for optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), an attractive diagnostic tool for non-invasive, label-free vascular imaging in vivo, was demonstrated in conjunction with OCX to extract high-resolution cutaneous vasculature, significantly improving the visualization and characterization of micro-capillaries in vivo.

Katie Bouman
Assistant Professor
California Institute of Technology

We will discuss approaches we have developed to incorporate data-driven score-based priors into the imaging process to understand the sensitivity of the black hole image to different underlying assumptions. Additionally, we will discuss how we are developing techniques that will allow us to extract the evolving structure of our own Milky Way's black hole over the course of a night. In particular, we introduce Orbital Black Hole Tomography, which integrates known physics with a neural representation to map evolving flaring emission around the black hole in 3D for the first time.

At the recent 2024 Wavefront Congress, the late Professor Emeritus Jim Schwiegerling, Robert Shannon Endowed Chair in Optical Sciences, was remembered in a special presentation led by two alumni that he advised. The presentation given on March 8, 2024 was called, "Jim Schwiegerling: The Nicest Professor in the College Also Happens to be Brilliant" and was organized and given by Nathan Lewis, PhD (OSC 2011) and Deanna Moschitta, MS (OSC 2022).