Local Optics Company Kicks Off Conference With Clam Bake

By Zack Seward

Rochester, NY – 2010 is the 50th anniversary of the laser, and the Laser Science and Frontiers in Optics conferences are joining forces at the Rochester convention center this week. To kick it off it style, a local optics company hosted a clam bake.

The 12th annual clam bake put on by Rochester's Sydor Optics was its biggest yet. More than 200 guests showed up to the invite-only event, about half of them from out of town.

But the really impressive number is the number of clams.

"1,600 dozen clams," said Jim Sydor, president of Sydor Optics. "That's a lot of clams."

The more than 19,000 clams were cooked up for people from all corners of the American optics community: from designers to machine builders, PhDs to glass grinders.

Those who weren't in town already are here for the Frontiers in Optics Conference, which started on Sunday. It's held in Rochester every other year and put on by the Optical Society of America.

With about 100 optics companies in and around Rochester, the city is one of the nation's capitals of all things light. Even with well documented cutbacks at Kodak and Xerox, optics (the study of light) and photonics (the applied usage of light) remain a big part of the local economy.

"We have such a concentration of optics in Rochester," said Sydor Optics General Manager Michael Naselaris. "Some of the major materials suppliers in the U.S. are here in Rochester. So this is like mecca for the U.S. optics community."

According to Naselaris and other attendees, the clam bake is one of the community's premier events for networking, doing business and, of course, establishing clam-eating bragging rights.

"The record is 19 dozen and that gentleman is trying to break it this year by going to 25 [dozen]," said Naselaris.

The gentleman in question is Christopher Cotton, president of ASE Optics and Chairman of the Rochester Regional Photonics Cluster.

His other title: "Record holder of eating the most clams at the clam bake last year."

Cotton says the yearly clam bake is great for networking.

He says the Optical Society's conference is a great venue for Rochester to show off its muscle in the world of optics research and development.

"The people that have maintained that society are the academic people, the ones that are really doing the forefront research," said Cotton. "Those are the people that are really important to our industry."

The Frontiers in Optics and Laser Science conferences are at the Riverside Convention Center until Thursday.

As of press time, no word on whether Cotton bested his own clam record.