OSA 2011 Election Preview
The OSA election for the 2011 vice president and directors at large opens on July 13, 2010. Please take a few moments to read the
candidates’ statements and then voice your opinion by voting in this year’s election. You should have received instructions for electronic
voting or a paper ballot and materials in early July; if you did not receive either of these, please contact OSA at voting@osa.org or
call + 1.202.416.1960.
The election closes on October 1, 2010. Results will be announced at the OSA Annual Business Meeting on Tuesday evening,
October 26, 2010, in Rochester, N.Y., U.S.A.; they will be available on the OSA website ( www.osa.org) by early November.
Candidates for Vice President
One will be elected.
Kenneth G.H. Baldwin
Australian National University, Australia
OSA is arguably one of the world’s major
scientific societies. It has over 15,000
members—nearly half of whom reside outside the United States—and as a result the
Society is increasingly international in its
outlook. Significantly, this year, you—the
membership—will elect an international
vice president in the lead-up to the OSA
presidency in 2013.
As an OSA member for the past 20
years, I have followed its increasing internationalization with great interest. During
this time, I have worked closely with many
colleagues and friends in OSA’s leadership,
especially during my service on the OSA
board. There is a strong appreciation of
the need to embrace optics wherever it is
found, and indeed the Optical Society (as
it is frequently being called) can now be
viewed as a focus for optics worldwide.
However, this increasing international
role should be seen as complementing,
rather than replacing, the memberships
of national optical societies. Indeed, OSA
should help grow other societies. National
societies play a leading role in regional
networking and act as a professional home,
whereas the Optical Society can be the in-
ternational linchpin and primary publish-
ing house for research in optics.
be networked into the international optics
community equally and seamlessly.
This will mean exploring conference
rotation across the globe—already served
by three CLEOs—and encouraging topical meetings and Optics and Photonics
Congresses to move to optics hotspots
everywhere. It will include exploring
online journal access, Internet networks
and videoconferencing to broadcast optics
to distant locations in an era of increasing
climate change impacts. There is a bright
future for the Optical Society, and it is a
worldwide future.
Thomas Elsaesser
Max-Born-Institute/Humboldt
University, Germany
Fifty years after the birth of the laser,
optics has developed from a sub-field of
physics into a central area of multidisciplinary research. It has generated technologies with a strong impact on society.
