Donald Fraser, founding director of the Boston University (BU) Photonics Center, stepped down in January, reported BU Today, the university's official newspaper. Thomas Bifano, a College of Engineering professor and chairman of the manufacturing engineering department, was named interim director. BU said a search committee expects to name a permanent director by the end of the year. Before joining BU, Fraser served in the George H. W. Bush administration as the No. 2 acquisition official in the Department of Defense. He also spent nearly 30 years at Draper Laboratory leading the design and development of guidance, control and navigation systems for the Apollo space missions and for the Trident and MX missiles, rising to the position of executive vice president and chief operating officer. Last year, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics named Fraser an Honorary Fellow, a distinction previously bestowed on the likes of Orville Wright and Neil Armstrong. Deputy Director Glenn Thoren said the 18 companies that have gone through the center’s business accelerator program have garnered about $250 million in venture capital support. . . . The Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA) announced it is offering a free video library of presentations from its annual forum and other events via its Web site, at www.oida.org. Recent OIDA presentations include Mark Wegleitner, Verizon CTO, on the company's broadband offerings; Jonathan Adelstein, FCC commissioner, on FCC support for broadband; Giorgio Anania, Bookham president and CEO, on the company's strategy for the "post-bubble years"; John Igel, director of Corning's fiber-to-the-x program, on the potential of fiber to the home; Michael Lebby, OIDA executive director, on worldwide optoelectronic markets. . . . Finland's University of Jyvaskyla and University of Turku have developed BioImageXD, free open-source software for three-dimensional (3-D) microscopy and other data analysis and visualization applications. BioImageXD can read Carl Zeiss LSM510 confocal microscope .lsm files and can import stacks of 8-bit .tif and other image formats. 3-D images can be exported as numbered stacks of 8-bit greyscale .tif images and imported into BioImageXD. Some Leica files are also supported, and Olympus FV1000 confocal microscope and other microscope manufacturers' data files will be supported soon, according to the developers. For details, visit: www.bioimagexd.org . . . Twelve Rochester-area high-school students who have finished their junior year will spend this summer working at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). The students, who will work 40 paid hours a week, will be involved in projects related to the 60-beam Omega laser, the world's most powerful fusion laser, and the Omega EP laser, which is under construction. The students will be supervised by research staff and will also attend science and technology-related seminars; they will present the results of their summer work at a symposium in August. Applications are due by by March 24. For more information, visit: www.lle.rochester.edu