Welcome and Introduction to Conference 11876

My colleagues, Dr. Nils Haverkamp and Dr. Richard Youngworth, and I would like to welcome you to the second Optical Instrument, Science, Technology, and Applications conference at the 2021 SPIE European Optical design event. Optical instruments are a critical area of development that enable science and many emerging engineering technologies. This second conference consists of four sessions of high-quality presentations, a poster session, a live networking session, and proceedings articles. This year’s sessions focus on developments and advancements in medical devices and microscopes, instruments and concepts for 2D and 3D imaging, structured light, computational methods, prototyping, and metrology. From the call for papers: “This Optical Instrument Science, Technology, and Applications conference has been created to further enable the integration of components, design, and modelling key to successful optical instrument development and applications. The focus of this conference is on optical systems and instruments, along with applications enabled by such methods.” The conference also provides a forum to encourage technology development that is imperative for the future optical instrument science and technology advancement. We plan to continue this conference at the next European Optical Design event. We encourage everyone interested in optical instrument science, technology, and applications to look for the call for papers and to submit your work. We certainly value the quality submissions as well as the opportunity to help facilitate and take part in the community’s interaction. Please feel free to contact us or anyone on our program committee if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing you at the next event to further discuss this exciting area of optics and photonics. We sincerely thank our contributed presenters and the wonderfully supportive community for making the sessions of this conference such a success. We must also thank our excellent program committee and the SPIE staff for their ideas and promotion of this conference. Dr. Breann N. Sitarski, on behalf of SPIE and her Co-Chairs