Gerd Leuchs studied physics at the Universities of Cologne and Munich. After stays in the USA and Switzerland, he was appointed full professor of physics at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. Since 2009 he was director at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and since 2011 he is professor adjunct at the University of Ottawa. He is member of the German and of the Russian Academy of Sciences and holds honorary degrees from Danish Technical University and St. Petersburg State University. He won the 2005 Quantum Electronics and Optics Prize of the European Physical Society and the 2018 Herbert Walther Prize, a joint award by Optica (formerly OSA) and the German Physical Society (DPG). He is a fellow of the European Optical Society, of Optica, of the Institute of Physics and of the Chinese Optical Society. In 2012 he was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and in 2018 he was appointed a member of Bavaria's Maximilian Order. He is the 2024 president of Optica. His research spans the whole range from classical to quantum optics, with emphasis on the limits of focussing, on photon-atom-coupling and on quantum noise reduction of light.

The quantum vacuum plays a vital role for optics. Three aspects will be high-lighted: (1) The quantum uncertainty of the electro-magnetic field in vacuum induces spontaneous emission of atoms. (2) The vacuum shows an electric as well as a magnetic response and the interference of the electric and magnetic dipoles are responsible of the forward scattering of Huygens elementary waves.(3) The values of permittivity and the permeability of the vacuum, epsilon_zero and mu_zero, can be related to the virtual elementary particles populating the vacuum.

Yu-Chong Tai is the Anna L. Rosen Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at California Institute of Technology (i.e., Caltech). He is the founder and inaugural Chair (i.e., Executive Officer) of the Department of Medical Engineering at Caltech. As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, he developed the first electrically-spun polysilicon micromotor. After PhD, he joined Caltech and his research has focused on Micro/NanoElectroMechanicalSystem (MEMS/NEMS) and biomedical devices (mems.caltech.edu). Examples of devices from his lab include wireless ECG and heart-rate sensors, complete blood count (CBC) lab-on-achip-, retinal prosthetic implants for blindness caused by RP/AMD, spinal cord implants, brain implants, intraocular drug delivery pumps, oxygen-transporters for diabetic retinopathy, Implantable pressure sensors, etc. His is currently developing new devices for atherosclerosis, Type1 diabetes, and cancer. He was the recipient of IBM Fellowship, Ross Tucker Award, the Best Thesis Award in EECS (UCB), Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) Award, Packard Award, ALA Achievement Award, (Popular Mechanics) Breakthrough Award, and the (inaugural) IEEE Robert Bosch MEMS/NEMS Award. He has more than 800 articles/patents in the field of MEMS devices. He is IEEE, AIMBE and NAI Fellow. He is also an academician of the Academia Sinica, (Taiwan, ROC) and a member of National Academy of Engineering (NAE, USA).

MEMS/NEMS has many possible biomedical applications. One especially challenging but promising direction is “micro eye implants to correct/preserve/recover the intraocular optics, or vision, of an eye.” Here “micro eye implants” are defined as implantable small devices to interface with and/or replace defective intraocular tissues that are important for eye optics. However, the optics of a human eye involves many parts and hundreds of million cells, and hundreds of diseases can damage it. According to WHO, four major eye diseases cause ~80% of world blindness, and they are cataract, glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa (RP)/age-related macular disease (AMD), and diabetic retinopathy. This work reviews the author's micro eye implant research on these four diseases.

Jennifer Kehlet Barton received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She previously worked on the International Space Station program, and is currently the Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. She additionally is the Director of the BIO5 Institute, a university-wide catalyst for interdisciplinary research. She serves as the 2024 President of SPIE.

Endoscopes can traverse small luminal structures to enable minimally-invasive early detection of cancer. Very small diameter structures such as the fallopian tubes require extreme miniaturization and unique optical design. We utilize semi-custom and 3D printed sub-mm diameter optics to achieve high resolution and close focus designs. Flexible, pushable, robust endoscope mechanical design is additionally a challenge. Incorporating physician-desired elements such as tissue biopsy adds complexity. I will discuss our experience on the benchtop and in the operating room with various endoscopes, including multiple iterations of a fallopian tube endoscope.

Professor Shum, chair professor of the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Director of Guangdong Key Laboratory of Integrated Optoelectronics Intellisense, IEEE Fellow, SPIE Fellow, OSA Fellow, President of IEEE Photonics Society. He has published 500 academic journal papers with more than 20,000 citations, and H-index 70. He served as Director of the Network Technology Research Centre (NTRC), Photonics Centre of Excellence (OPTIMUS), and Centre for Optical Fibre Technology (COFT), and Associate Chair in charge of academic programs in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. During this period, a world-class fiber research/processing center was created, which enabling Singapore to have the ability to manufacture special fiber optics, special fiber lasers and sensors. He chaired several major international conferences, including CLEO-PR | OECC| PGC 2017; and initiator of several international conferences such as PGC, ICOCN, ICAIT, OGC, etc. He collaborates closely with universities and institutes worldwide.in four different languages. Two high-tech enterprises in the field of optoelectronics were established or supported by his team (1 of which has been listed). His team also cooperate closely with universities and institutes worldwide.

Optical fiber-based devices have been widely deployed in recent years. There are many advantages of using fiber as a sensor. These include electrically-passive operation, light weight, immunity to radio frequency interference and electromagnetic interference, high sensitivity, compact size, corrosion resistance, easily multiplexing and potentially low cost.

Several novel fiber-based sensors and technologies developed are presented here, including fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based sensors, photonic crystal fiber (PCF) based sensors, specialty fiber-based sensors and distributed fiber sensing systems. FBGs as instinctive sensors, are ingeniously designed as two-dimensional (2D) tilt sensors, displacement sensors, accelerometers and corrosion sensors here; PCF based evanescent field absorption sensor, PCF induced Mach-Zehnder interferometer and Fabry-Perot refractometer for temperature and refractive index sensing are presented; based on localized surface Plasmon resonant (LSPR) effect, nano-sized fiber tip with gold nanoparticles are demonstrated for live cell index bio-sensing applications.

Prof. Shangjr (Felix) Gwo received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin, USA in 1993. From 1994 to 1997, he worked in Tsukaba, Japan as a researcher. He joined National Tsing-Hua University (NTHU), Hsinchu, Taiwan as a faculty member in 1997. From 2010 to 2014, he served as the Vice President for Research and Development in NTHU and he is currently a Distinguished Chair Professor of Physics.

Besides his academic career in NTHU, Prof. Gwo served as the Director of National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center (NSRRC) in Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan from 2014 to 2018. And, from 2019 to 2022, he served as the Director of Research Center for Applied Sciences (RCAS) in Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taiwan. Prof. Gwo's research interests include material physics (semiconductors, metals, and superconductors), nanophotonics, plasmonics, and surface/interface science. Most recently, his research group works extensively on linear and nonlinear plasmonic metasurfaces, two-dimensional materials, plasmonic nanolasers, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, and nitride nanostructure-based light-emitting and detection devices. Prof. Gwo is an elected fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Physical Society of Taiwan.

Epitaxy is a type of crystal growth method, in which crystalline layers are formed with well-defined orientations with respect to the dissimilar crystalline structures of substrates (i.e., wafers). In photonic and optoelectronic device applications for light emitting and detection, such as light-emitting diodes, lasers, and single-photon emitters, semiconductor heterostructures (quantum wells, nanorods, and quantum dots) formed by epitaxy have been widely deployed as the main device building blocks. In comparison, metal and superconductor nanostructures used for plasmonic and superconducting device applications are typically made from less-demanding material deposition methods. Recently, we have found dramatically different material properties and device performance obtained by using crystalline metal and superconductor films grown by molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) under ultrahigh vacuum conditions. Especially, I will highlight the recent results of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) based on the MBE-grown transition-metal nitride films (ultrathin single-crystalline NbN and NbTiN layers). Due to their exceptional detection performance (quantum-limited sensitivity, high efficiency, low dark count, high temporal resolution) and wafer-scale device uniformity, epitaxy-enabled SNSPD arrays will play a key role for future photonic quantum computing and quantum communication applications.