EnVision Workshop, February 2015, Hyderabad, India
The inaugural EnVision Workshop was held at the LV Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India. The workshop was organized in conjunction with Shrikant Bharadwaj, PhD. The workshop took place in the LV Prasad Eye Institute Innovation Center with about 16 of the Vision Sciences Researchers and Optometrists from the LV Prasad Eye Institute.
Here are some comments in an email from Shrikant during the course of the workshop (Feb. 5, 2015):
Dear all:
I just wanted to provide you an update on the bio-engineering workshop happening at our Srujana Innovation center along with Adrian Glasser. The intention of the workshop was to provide our budding vision scientists some key engineering survival skills in building small equipment, electronics, 3D printing, LASER cutting and matlab programming. The program is a very unique one and perhaps no other place in the whole world offers so much to students involved in biomedical-engineering research.
Today is the 4th day of the workshop and it will conclude tomorrow (Friday) evening. Thus far, the workshop is going great guns and we (14 optometry staff involved in research at LVPEI) have all learnt a lot during these three days. The first day was giving background work on controlling motors and LED's using a microprocessor (arduino boards) with some hands-on work with the boards. The second day involved learning about 3D printing and CAD drawings and how simple structures needed for custom-designed experiments could be built in-house with the tools already available at Srujana. This was once again followed by some hands-on work on developing some of these drawings. Wednesday involved matlab programming and how the electronic boards could be controlled using matlab for simple yet effective experimentation. Today, we visited the LASER cutting workshop in Koti, Hyderabad, and saw how the prototypes designed on Tuesday were actually printed and made usable for future work.
Three prototypes have been designed thus far and one has already achieved fruition. Parthu from our contact lens department built a V-Guage used to measure diameters of contact lenses using a 3D programming software and today got it cut and now ready for use. Two more prototypes will become functional by the end of the workshop tomorrow evening. Attached are some pictures of the workshop taken thus far. More details of the workshop can be seen @ http://adrianglasser.com/EnVisionWorkshop/index.html
Needless to say, Adrian has been the key factor to the success of this workshop. I wanted to thank Adrian personally through this email for all his support and enthusiasm. The two of us are talking to make this a constant feature of the Srujana Innovation Center and extend to people beyond the Optometry group.
Thanks much!
Shrikant
Here are some remarks from co-organizer Shrikant after the conclusion of the workshop (Feb. 7, 2015):
Dear all:
Undoubtedly last week was one of the best times in our lives thus far. The true essence of learning and having fun was realized in the EnVision 2015 workshop. All of you were awesome and so enthusiastic to learn. Such a response makes the lives of mentors like Adrian and myself very easy. There was also a really good display of ownership and camaraderie amongst all of you – be it going down and ordering tea/coffee or running off to KAR campus to get some equipment or arranging a time with the LASER cutter – all of you gave your 100% of effort. Personally, it was a very proud moment for me to hear Adrian praise our group! Thank you for making this happen.
I also want to thank Harsha, Karthik and Dhruv of the innovation center for their tremendous support before and during the workshop. Honestly, without Harsha and Dhruv in the background, I would have no idea what to get or where to get it. Hats off to you, Harsha and Dhruv!!
The true success of this workshop is yet to be realized however. It will be realized only when all of you continue to build on what we had learnt and prepare ourselves to become independent vision scientists. This workshop merely made you realize that you are capable of doing this. May I therefore ask that each of you diligently follow up on whatever you were working on and implement it for your research or teaching. This might well form the platform for future workshops. Insha Allah – we will have EnVision 2016 with more things to learn and achieve.
I will soon be circulating a SurveyMonkey link seeking your valuable feedback on the workshop. Please feel free to indicate the positive and negative aspects of the workshop. This will help me and Adrian shape the next program.
Make sure to add this link to your bookmarks: http://adrianglasser.com/EnVisionWorkshop/WS_2015.html
Thanks again! You are all champions!
Shrikant
