Slaughter Begins Push for National Optics Institute
U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-Fairport, has started to extol the virtues of optics and photonics to the White House in hopes of eventually landing substantial federal funding for an optics manufacturing institute.
In a letter to President Barack Obama, Slaughter asked the president to consider optics when setting up a series of manufacturing innovation institutes around the country. The White House announced in February the first such institute, the Digital Lab for Manufacturing, to be based in the Chicago area. It is to serve as an R&D lab for manufacturing processes and then disseminate the results and findings to U.S. companies.
According to Slaughter’s office, if the White House agrees that optics is an important enough technology to warrant a similar institute, then she will push for it to be located in the Rochester area.