The annual Great Lakes Photonics Symposium (GLPS), which will debut June 7-11 at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel, in Cleveland, Ohio, will promote cooperation between regional optics and photonics companies, the government and academia and will provide a forum to discuss research and the potential for collaboration, according to its sponsors, the Air Force Research Laboratory and The International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE). The symposium will feature a plenary session, ten conferences with more than 320 speakers, poster presentations, a trade show, short courses and a panel on workforce competitiveness and the outsourcing of technical jobs throughout the Great Lakes Region. Former astronaut Story Musgrave will also speak. Conference topics will include liquid crystal technology applications, biophotonics, automotive application quantum optics and advanced spectroscopy, homeland defense technologies, high-peak-power and high-average-power lasers, enabling photonics technologies, aerospace applications, nanotechnology, microelectromechanical systems and automatic recognition and processing technology applications. Support for the symposium is also being provided by the IEEE/Lasers and Electro-Optics Society, the Laser Institute of America, the Ohio Optical Consortium and the Optical Society of America. For more information, visit: www.usasymposium.com/glps/