Profile

The Optical Society of Chicago was founded in 1948 and became affiliated with OPTICA (formerly Optical Society of America) in 1950. Our membership celebrated our 70th anniversary in 2018.

When the society was founded, there was a large optical manufacturing presence in the Chicago area. Many of those companies have since gone out of business or moved out of the area. Now, many of our members are users of optical engineering in such diverse fields as medical instrumentation, industrial vision, and imaging.

Of course, there have been many changes in how we organize our activities. We have learned to plan ahead whenever possible to keep momentum going and members involved. Thus, even before we have closed the books on one season, we have already had a joint meeting of both the old and new board members to make the year end transition easier and smoother. This is especially important because our break occurs over the summer and we need to stay organized to be able to plan a new meeting schedule and still work around everyone's vacation schedule. This also helps keep ongoing projects under control.

Our officers, elected annually, are a President, Secretary, Treasurer and three Board of Directors. Also serving on the Board of Directors are last year's President and our local section representative from OPTICA. Unlike many other local sections, we do not have a program chair. In the past, the President-Elect served as program chair. However, this was always the most difficult, time consuming, and hated office. For the past few years all the officers have cooperated to arrange the meetings as a committee.

At the first Board meeting of the year, the Board sets all dates for regular and board meetings. We arrange two to six dinner/talk meetings per year. Our schedule calls for meeting the second Thursday in the months of September, November, January, March, and May and a year end meeting, generally the first Friday in June. These dates are considered firm unless they conflict with a holiday, trade show/technical conference, or the speaker's schedule. We also determine a list of topics of interest to the members. This list is developed from requests, last year's best attended meetings, and suggestions from the board members. We then brainstorm possible speakers. Most of our speakers are local or are traveling to Chicago for other reasons.

Each Board Member then takes responsibility for a meeting. This means contacting the speaker and confirm the speaker is willing to give a talk on the selected subject or something related. As soon as we have confirmed arrangements with the speakers by mail, we set up a calendar for upcoming events, showing the meetings for the entire year. This calendar is published in every meeting notice.

The Secretary arranges the meeting sites. We try to do one tour or facility visit per year. Generally, the rest of the meetings are held at a restaurant convenient to O'Hare airport because our members come from all over the northern Illinois area (as well as some from Milwaukee) and all the expressways come together at O'Hare.

The OSC is involved in a number of activities beyond our regular meetings. These include sponsoring an award at the annual Chicago Public Schools Science Fair each April. We have learned over the years that although many of our members are too busy to commit to being an officer for an entire year, they are often willing to become involved in a short project such as taking a day to go down an be an award judge.

In the past several years, we have also been involved in a mini-conference in Chicago. In conjunction with SPIE, we have put on four Optical Engineering Midwest Conferences. The SPIE group has arranged the conference and tutorials and OSC has arranged exhibits. Each OEM has been a one or two day event.

This year, we are also planning to concentrate on an educational program. We will kick-off this program by presenting at the Des Plaines Library Science Expo. We plan on participating in around ten educational outreach programs throughout the year. We are looking forward to encourage science teachers and their students to look further at optics as an interesting and rewarding field of science.