Support for the 2012 OSA Biomedical Optics Meeting, Miami, Florida, April 29 - May 2, 2012

由美国光学学会（OSA）组织的两年一次的生物医学光学专题会议（简称BIOMED）是生物医学光学领域在广度和深度上的主要会议。自1994年第一次会议以来，这些会议的规模已经从几十人增加到500多人，大多数是研究生，包括女性和其他代表性不足的学生。BIOMED会议上的大多数技术会议都与NSF的一些项目的任务有关。会议为生物医学光学界提供了一个独特的机会，分享令人兴奋的最新技术发展，激发新的想法，学习新的挑战和方向，并探索/促进新的合作。会议也提供了一个有效的平台来教育我们的学生、未来的科学家和工程师在多学科领域，并促进他们发展与不同背景的人合作的技能。这意味着把物理科学和生物科学的学生聚集在一起，给他们机会了解其他学科，并找到方法说服学生打破他们经常发现自己的学科特定界限。

Abstract#1247356Rogan, ElizabethThe biannual Biomedical Optics Topical Meetings (BIOMED for short), organized by the Optical Society of America (OSA), is the premier meeting in the area of biomedical optics both in breadth and depth. Since the very first meeting in 1994, these meetings have grown in size from a few tens to over 500 attendees, and the majority is graduate students including female and other underrepresented students. Most of the technical sessions at the BIOMED meeting are relevant to the mission of quite a few programs at NSF.The meeting offers a unique opportunity for the biomedical optics community to share the exciting state-of-the-art technological developments, stimulate new ideas, learn new challenges and directions, and explore/promote new collaborations. The meeting also offers an effective platform to educate our students, future scientists and engineers in multidisciplinary fields and facilitate them to develop skills of collaborating with people from different backgrounds. This means bringing physical science and biological science students together, giving them opportunities to be informed about other disciplines, and finding ways to convince students to break out of the discipline-specific boundaries in which they often find themselves.