Ideas For Successful DTL Visits

  • The public lecture should be given a flashy, popular title. It should be identified in advertisements as "for the General Public," or similar.
  • Visual aides (eg. photos, professional quality slides or viewgraphs, etc.) and analogies, stories, etc., should be used effectively by the DTL.
  • Have the lecturer send a reading list of accessible papers for students to look at ahead of time.
  • Have a session for students called "What is it like to be a research scientist?" or "Graduate School and Beyond, the Future for Physics," etc.
  • A past lecturer (Ron Shen) presented a special talk for undergrads titled "The Simple Ideas behind the Nobel Prizes in Laser Science."
  • Free-form discussions with groups of undergraduate and graduate students might be difficult to pull off. It is better to have structured topics. Example — a guest lecture in a class related to Laser Science.
  • Lunch with students might be a good idea to provide an informal meeting without pressure.

Millennia X laser

Dr. James Kafka is a noted senior scientist at Spectra-Physics. He has led development on many cutting edge laser technologies such as the Millennia X lasers shown here.