Student society

The Student Optical Society – United Optical Community, UOC – has been active at the department since 2002. Inside it are the student chapters of two international organisations: SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics, and Optica, formerly the Optical Society of America. Both are registered to Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and are still active. The SPIE chapter even appeared a year before the society itself – in 2001.

This is not a line in an activity report. Membership means money for a trip to a conference, access to a professional digital library and a line in a CV that is read carefully abroad.

What it gives a student

Conference grantsSPIE and Optica pay for travel, accommodation and registration for a student who goes to present. Ours have travelled to San Diego, Rochester, Riga and Prague
Education scholarshipsThe SPIE Educational Scholarship Grant – an individual scholarship for research and publications. Several students of the department received it every year
Digital libraryMembership opens the SPIE Digital Library and Optica journals. Without it, access to a single paper costs tens of dollars
Summer schoolsInternational schools and workshops that take students by competition. The fastest way to see from the inside how another laboratory works
Leadership experienceThe chapter is run by a student. The president plans events, writes grant applications and reports on them to the international organisation. In a CV this weighs no less than grades
Popularising opticsThe chapter gives lectures and demonstrations for school pupils. Explaining diffraction to someone hearing about it for the first time is a skill of its own

Two chapters

SPIE · founded in 2001The International Society for Optics and Photonics. The chapter was created by young researchers of the department together with the leadership of the Ukrainian section of SPIE. In the SPIE directory it is listed as Taras Shevchenko National Univ. of Kyiv Chapter. There are six such chapters in Ukraine; ours is one of the two in Kyiv
Optica · formerly OSAUntil 2021 the organisation was called the Optical Society of America. In the Optica directory the chapter is listed as Taras Shevchenko National Univ. of Kyiv. In the 2010s its adviser was Vasyl Stashchuk

What the chapter does

Not a meeting once a semester, but work that takes the department beyond the faculty. Most of it goes to school pupils.

Autumn School on Optics and Laser PhysicsA two-day school for school pupils right before the SPO symposium. It was held four times in a row; the last one, in 2019, was attended by 180 pupils, sixty of them from other regions of Ukraine. The department intends to revive the school. Optical demonstrations, lectures, the pupils’ own projects, which they then present at SPO itself. In parallel, Vasyl Yashchuk runs a separate workshop for teachers and parents – on where optics leads next
Research competition for school pupilsJointly with the Junior Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Teenagers aged 13–16 do their own project at the department under the guidance of chapter members. Three stages: remote assessment of the work, an optics test, an oral defence with questions from the jury. The winners get diplomas and cash prizes from the chapter, with the awards presented on the International Day of Light
“Physics Lecture Hall”Free Saturday physics lectures for senior school pupils. In the 2018/19 season they ran from November to April
School visitsIn April 2019 chapter members toured ten schools with popular lectures on optics and laser physics and school olympiads: Rivne, Kryvyi Rih, Lutsk, Sarny, Ostroh, Khmelnytskyi and Kyiv
The book “Optics at School: 10 Experimental Projects”The chapter wrote and published it in two languages, Ukrainian and English, in a print run of 200 copies. The authors are Ivan Kovan, Vladyslav Lysiuk, Andrii Shcherbakov and Danylo Babich
All-Ukrainian meeting of SPIE chaptersThe chapter hosted colleagues from Kharkiv, Vinnytsia, Chernivtsi and Odesa in Kyiv. The first part was a conversation about careers in optics: academia, government or industry, with stories from those who had already chosen. The second was a lecture by Professor Tsukasa Yoshida on science and study in Japan

How much it weighs in numbers

To make the scale tangible, here is what one working year of the chapter looked like – 2019, for which full reporting has survived.

180Pupils at the autumn school, sixty of them from other regions
10Schools in seven cities in a single April
130Participants of SPO, which the chapter organised together with the OSA chapter
$2 900SPIE grants in a year – for the school, the competition, trips and printing the book

That same year SPO was held for the twentieth time, and the award for the best oral talk went to Artem Levchuk – a graduate of the department, who came back as a researcher from Le Mans University. And chapter members went around the world with their own talks: Washington, San Francisco, Trieste, Riga.

Who ran it and what became of them

The chapter is led by one of the students every year. Here is where they ended up.

Valentyn Stadnytskyi · chair of the OSA chapter, 2010Received a Student Travel Grant from the OSA Foundation and represented the department at the 94th Frontiers in Optics conference in Rochester. Today he is CTO of a robotics start-up in Maryland, USA
Dmytro Hnatiuk · president of the SPIE chapter, 2011SPIE Officer Travel Grant and a talk at SPIE Optics + Photonics in San Diego. The same year – an award of the NAS of Ukraine for work on the ellipsometry of surface functional layers of CdTe single crystals
Olena Polianska · president of the OSA chapter and the EOS club, 2014SPIE scholar in 2010 and 2011. In 2010 – an award of the NAS of Ukraine for the best student work in materials science
Rostyslav Danylo · president of the SPIE chapter, 2014Today he works at the Max Born Institute in Berlin on attosecond physics. Before that – doctoral studies at the École Polytechnique in Paris
Serhii Derenko · president of the SPIE chapter, 2018–2019Together with Mykyta Redkin (vice-president), Vlada Kyrisha (secretary) and Ihor Babin (treasurer) he ran the anniversary SPO-2019 and the autumn school for 180 pupils. The same year he gave a talk at Frontiers in Optics in Washington
Andrii Shcherbakov · chair of the Optica chapterToday Technical Product Owner at Roche, Germany. Doctorate in physics – Technical University of Munich

Grants our students have received

Students of the department have won the SPIE education scholarship at least twenty-one times. It is an individual scholarship for research, study materials and publications – from three to eleven thousand dollars.

Some received the scholarship more than once: Dmytro Hnatiuk and Mykola Biednov – three times in a row, Kateryna Movlian and Mykyta Redkin – twice.

Apart from the scholarships, the chapter twice won the SPIE outreach grant for work with school pupils – Andrii Shcherbakov in 2018 and Serhii Derenko in 2020. It was this money that paid for the autumn school. In 2019 Andrii Maksymov was named an SPIE Community Champion.

Anna Kosar, Arsenii Prymak and Oleksandra Ivakhno-Tsehelnyk were also scholars – in total at least seventeen people.

2010. SPIE education scholarships went to Dmytro Hnatiuk, Olena Polianska and Mykhailo Rakov. Olesia Sniezhkova – an SPIE grant for the Optics-2010 conference in Poland and a visit to the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. Mykhailo Rakov and Dmytro Hnatiuk gave talks at the Inter-Academia conference in Riga. Oleksandra Hanus was on an internship in Germany.

2011. SPIE education scholarships went to Mykola Biednov, Dmytro Hnatiuk, Olena Polianska and Yevhen Shynkarenko. Serhii Morozov took part in the Week of Doctoral Students at Charles University in Prague.

Two from this list work in Hamburg today: Mykola Biednov is an instrument scientist at the FXE instrument of European XFEL, and Olesia Sniezhkova went into the optical industry and works at Eclipse Optics in Sweden. Yevhen Shynkarenko is a research engineer at the Swiss centre CSEM in Neuchâtel. Where else our graduates work →

European Optical Society

In 2014 the society also had a student club of the European Optical Society (EOS); its academic adviser was Ihor Shaikevych. The club is not mentioned in later materials of the department – as of 2024 the department names two chapters, SPIE and Optica.

The autumn school was last held in 2019, and the department intends to revive it. Work with school pupils did not stop meanwhile – it simply moved to the department: in 2023–2024 there were meetings with lyceums, a trip to Talne and meetings with graduates of the optical and mechanical college. If you are a school pupil, a teacher or a parent and want to be told the dates – write to optics.phys@knu.ua, and we will put you on the list.

How to join

The chapters are open to students of the department – both to those who simply want to help with events and to those ready to take on running a chapter. Write to optics.phys@knu.ua.

Scholarships and grantsGraduates of the department