Cairn will be participating in the Advanced Optical Microscopy course in Plymouth this April (8th-18th) as usual, but with a rather nice difference this time, as we’ll also be providing one of the students! So congratulations are due to Tomas (Tom) Parrado for being accepted, as the course is always several times oversubscribed. Tom joined us as an engineer a couple of years ago, having obtained both his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Surrey. Although he does get his hands dirty operating actual machinery from time to time, most of what he makes – or gets made – he has designed himself. Some of it even works (he is actually rather good). Since this has also introduced him to optical design, almost always involving microscopes, this course will be an ideal opportunity for him to learn more about that side of things, and which we can certainly put to very good use!
There will be a slight downside for him though, in that amongst other things he will be obliged to sit through Cairn’s President Martin’s talk on light sources, which he gives every year in spite of popular demand, but one or two other Cairn representatives are likely to be on hand to throw the rotten fruit, thereby sparing Tom the embarrassment of having to do it himself. That technology has progressed dramatically since Martin gave his first Plymouth lecture on it in 2003, when he says he struggled to make an “old and boring” subject sound interesting. Now he claims to make an increasingly interesting subject sound boring, but be that as it may, it is certainly an increasingly important one for us at Cairn. Watch this space for further developments!
