Five years of the European Adaptive Optics Summer School

Laura K Young¹, Caroline Kulcsár², Karen M Hampson³, Timothy J Morris⁴, Martin J Booth⁵, Adam Dubis⁶, Enrique J Fernandez⁷,
Qi Hu⁵, Pedro Mecê⁸, Serge Meimon⁹, Benoit Neichel¹⁰, James Osborn⁴, Marinko V Sarunic⁶, Matthew J Townson¹¹, Matthieu Boffety², Mamoune Bouanani², Sylvie Lebrun², Marie-Anne Burcklen², Yann Clénet¹², Nicolas Galland², Lionel Jacubowiez²,
Inès de Jongh², Penelope F Lawton¹, Nicolas Levraud², Perrine Lognoné,⁴ Irene Papagiannouli², Henri-François Raynaud², Pablo Artal⁷, Timothy Butterley⁴, Vincent Chambouleyron¹⁰, Celine d’Orgeville¹³, Michael Pircher¹⁴, and Andrew P Reeves⁴

¹Biosciences Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK;

²Université Paris-Saclay, Institut d’Optique Graduate School, CNRS, Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Palaiseau, France;

³Department of Optometry, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK;

⁴Centre for Advanced Instrumentation, Durham University, Durham, UK;

⁵Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK;

⁶Institute of Ophthalmology, University College London, London, UK;

⁷Laboratorio de Óptica, Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Óptica y Nanofísica, Campus de Espinardo (Ed. 34), Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain;

⁸Institut Langevin, CNRS, Université PSL, Paris, France;

⁹DOTA, ONERA, Université Paris-Saclay, Palaiseau, France;

¹⁰ Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, Marseille, France;

¹¹Department of Mathematics, Physics, and Electrical Engineering, Northumbria University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK;

¹²LIRA, Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, CNRS, Meudon, France;

¹³Australia Telescope National Facility, CSIRO, Canberra, Australia;

¹⁴Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Adaptive optics (AO) is developed and used in a range of application areas, from observing microscopic cells to distant galaxies. While the implementation and challenges are different between fields, the basic principles of AO are common. In 2019 we began to develop the European Adaptive Optics Summer School with the aim of bringing together students and researchers from across the range of AO domains to learn and develop connections with one another. The first school took place in 2021 and after three years running virtually, we moved to an in-person school with hybrid attendance. This has taken place at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School in Palaiseau, France for the last two years and will be held at the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation (CfAI) in Durham, UK in 2026. This paper presents a summary of the school, both in remote and hybrid format. We describe the motivations for the school, the training provided, and a short analysis of the demographics of the school, and how this has changed over the last five years © Anita Publications. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Adaptive optics, Telescope operators, Vision science, Retinal imaging, Microscopy.

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