PHOTONICS WEST 2024 ROUND-UP


Photonics innovations are key to fighting


climate change


Matt Keller, Director Engineering, Global Health Labs; Stephani Otte, Science Program Officer, Imaging, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, Photonics100 honouree and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Vanderbilt University


comes with fewer regulations than federal awards. She also highlights the fact it can be more flexible about collaborating with other sources, echoing Keller’s point about the interest these organisations can have in industry partnerships. Stephani Otte, Science


Program Officer, Imaging, at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative says it has a growing team of programming staff distributing funds, with a focus of breaking down silos in technologies and a broader mission to work to cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the century. In the coming 10 years, the initiative was prioritising the study of cells and how they interact with systems. It aims to build and democratise next-generation software and hardware tools to drive biological insights, generating more accurate and biologically important sources of data. Otte says there are


technological bottlenecks, with imaging tools providing limited views that are often not in context; slow and inefficient development of technology; training and access gaps across the area and researchers struggling to make quantitative insights. Its Frontiers Program is trying to solve that, with 123 grantees, 47 Frontiers projects and 11 Scialogs projects currently in place. Its Community Program has grants with 195 imaging scientists. “We are engaged in direct partnerships with industry,”


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said Otte. “Part of our programme is focused on the dissemination of technologies and we think companies can play a big role in this. Some of our funding will go into this, as we think it is vital to pair with companies.” She says the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is leaning towards basic science, with a belief a lot of advances can be made with that focus, and that a scientific advisory board steered many of the internal priorities and therefore its funding approach. Start-ups were advised to


think hard about their pitch. “You need to know what your focus is,” said Keller. “It may be that you can’t develop [your project] for a market such as the US and a developing country. Sometimes, start-ups will have investors who need their money back – and more – so that creates a focus on the US… If a company has a product that is not addressing lower-income countries but we think is a great fit, we can support something like that.” GH Labs has a multidisciplinary approach working across a range of fields. Keller told the audience that funding applicants should focus on impact rather than profit, but that a business case still needed to make sense for a long term sustainable solution. He echoed the other panellists in saying philanthropic organisations always wanted to hear new ideas and that reaching out to people working there, ahead of a funding submission, made sense.


Optics and photonics will be key in the development of new technologies that could revolutionise the way humanity fights climate change, according to Gemma Bale, Programme Director at the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), which was founded last year to ‘pursue scientific breakthroughs at the edge of the possible’. Bale is one of two Programme


Directors of a newly published ARIA – ‘Opportunity Space’ looking to harness breakthroughs in optics to transform the accuracy of climate projections, provide early warning signs of extreme weather events, and equip society to respond more effectively to climate change. This is one of seven


Opportunity Spaces currently being explored by ARIA – areas believed likely to yield significant breakthroughs from which new funding opportunities will emerge. “We see some big


opportunity gaps that need to be filled in the field of climate monitoring,” said Bale. “In the past three months, we’ve been speaking with climate scientists all over the world, and what we’ve realised is that, although the climate is being monitored in lots of different ways – from satellites to weather balloons and stations – there’s actually a lot of gaps in the current way we’re monitoring climate. It is not providing the coverage, sensitivity and resolution needed to fully understand the climate, and so we really need some revolutionary technologies to fill these gaps.” The reason this is so


important is because humanity uses climate models to make predictions and forecast the weather. “However, models are only as good as the data we give them,” Bale continued. “So because of these measurement gaps, we’re struggling to obtain models that are sensitive or accurate enough to actually help us in our fight against climate change. We really believe that


FEATURE


“We really believe that optics and photonics are where the solutions could be”


optics and photonics are where the solutions for this could be.” Bale attended Photonics


West to speak with the optics community about identifying innovations in other application fields that could potentially benefit climate monitoring. “I’d love to discuss where we might be able to steal, or even invent new optics and photonics, to start helping answer some of the unanswered questions in climate monitoring,” she said. “For example, using technologies such as adaptive optics or wavefront shaping to see into clouds, which are very difficult to measure inside (cloud physics is one of the least understood parts of the climate model). Or using improvements in mid-infrared detectors to better examine areas of permafrost or oil and gas plants releasing methane into the atmosphere. Or using a breakthrough in spectroscopy or frequency combs to improve the resolutions we need to detect small changes of carbon in the ocean – the earth’s biggest carbon sink.” In addition to improving


humanity’s capability to monitor the climate, such innovations could also increase the coverage of our monitoring efforts. “For example, the UK Met office records data exceptionally well in areas such as North America, Europe, and parts of Asia, but there are huge gaps in really important parts of the world. So we need to think about whether we can do better by using advances in optics and photonics technologies to really improve our coverage.” In publishing the new climate


Opportunity Space openly, Bale is hoping to get feedback from the community that could influence how ARIA shapes its programmes. “It’s therefore very important that you engage with us at this stage, especially if you’ve got an idea that can be directed towards a programme of funding,” Bale concluded.


March 2024 Electro Optics 11


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