INTERVIEW: SKILLS OUTREACH
Taking photonics education on the road
Thorlabs wanted to inspire the next generation of photonics leaders – so it went cross-country across the USA with a mobile photonics lab. Mark Elliott caught up with the team behind it
T
hat there is a skills shortage in photonics should not come as
a surprise to any reader of Electro Optics. A lack of qualified personnel, declining PhD numbers and succession management problems as engineers retire have all been cited as challenges by influential voices in the industry, including our own Photonics100. Potential solutions, however, are harder to nail down. Enter Thorlabs. The optical equipment company headquartered in Newton, New Jersey, has come up with an innovative way of inspiring the next generation of photonics leaders – and taken a lead at tackling the skills shortage in the process. The Mobile Photonics Lab Experience has travelled from New Jersey to Photonics West 2024 in San Francisco and Mark Elliott caught up with the executive team at Thorlabs that has helped make it happen:
Can you explain how the Mobile Photonics Lab project first came about? Michael Mohammadi, VP, Sales & Business Development: For 15 years, our founder and CEO Alex Cable had loved the idea of giving our customers access to our technology and [taking] our technologists on their site. His original vision was what we would refer to as a Winnebago because, endearingly, that’s
14 Electro Optics March 2024
what he would call it! And the idea was to drive around the country and host seminars, give talks, allow customers access to new products, let a lot of them get their hands on them and really just experience what it’s like to be a Thorlabs customer but in a very hands-on way. Multiple teams had built budgets and looked at formats from everything from little Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans all the way up to large trucks, but it never seemed to make sense. It seemed quite a challenge logistically, had a high cost, and we questioned its value. At the end of 2022, Alex came to me and asked me to revitalise the project and we then narrowed the focus down to not just getting customers to products and doing demos, but making it a pure education initiative, which was really exciting. I think the reason it had never been successful before is there hadn’t been a focus. Now that we were given this ability to focus on education, it got traction really quickly internally and the funding followed. Alex loved the shift to purely educational – instead of a product demo marketing platform, which is what a lot of companies do. We hired Noa Shaw, Bill
Warger was promoted to Director, Photonics Education, and we started synching up with a lot of ongoing workforce development initiatives that are ongoing at Thorlabs. We found
we could have a greater impact through the initiative by not just teaching physics, optics and photonics, but evangelising the photonics community. Awareness that has become a mainstay of the platform.
‘Nothing in photonics is really designed to be installed in a trailer’ right? Noa Shaw, Sales Enablement Specialist: I remember my first few days were spent mostly putting together presentations about which vehicle type we would choose! We ended up with a custom trailer that folds out with the stage, has two doors on one side and is a
very open concept. Our goal was to get everything up and running by September, which is when schools start in New Jersey, so we had three months to get everything done! It was definitely a challenge – fitting out the lab, figuring out where the optical tables go, and what that layout should be – we wanted to make sure that people weren’t going to just go in the lab and then be stuck. We had to make custom tables to fit in the lab. Nothing in photonics is really designed to be installed in a trailer, so that was a challenge but we got it done. We worked a lot with our internal teams to make custom
Inside the Thorlabs Mobile Photonics Lab Experience
www.electrooptics.com
Thorlabs
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