Grad School: Round Two

After my very long break (somewhere around 5 glorious weeks) I'm finally back to the grindstone, well, that is I will be after Jen and I go back to Texas this weekend to visit my parents.

A very exciting development (for me at least) is that I joined a research lab today. Professor Fiorenzo Omenetto kindly agreed to let me help him and his team look into the potential for ultrafast lasers (femtosecond pulses) and the nonlinear optics problems and potential they create. A "femtosecond is one billionth of one millionth of a second. For context, a femtosecond is to a second, what a second is to a hundred million years," from Wikipedia.

The project I'm currently working on is micromachining. Some other really cool research being explored includes optical tweezers (pretty much a Star Trek tractor beam on a really small scale), pulse shaping to control chemical reactions, and optofluidics to name a few. I won't go into details so as not to bore you, but it's really interesting stuff. So check out the links if you're even slightly interested.

The classes this term are looking up as well. I'm only taking two (which will leave me with one to go before finishing my course work--just thesis and seminars after that!):

• BME-101: Medical Optics and Lasers
• BME-131: Principles of Medical Imaging

I'm sure I'll let you know how things progress.