Development of a platform for advanced optics education, training and prototyping

In bio-medical research we often need to combine a broad range of expertise to run complex experiments and analyse and interpret their results. Also, it is desirable that all stakeholders of a project understand all parts of the experiment and analysis to draw and support the right conclusions. For imaging experiments this usually requires a basic understanding of the underlying physics. This has not necessarily been part of the professional training of all stakeholders, e.g. biologists or data scientists. Therefore an affordable platform for easily demonstrating and explaining imaging principles would be desirable.

Building up on a commercially available STEM Optics kit we developed extensions with widely available and affordable components to demonstrate advanced imaging techniques like e.g. confocal, lightsheet, OPT, spectral imaging. All models are quick and easy to build, yet demonstrate the important physical principles each imaging technique is based on.

Further use cases for this kit are training courses, demonstrations for imaging newbies when designing an experiment and outreach activities but also basic level prototyping.