Day 12

This morning we went to Bausch and Lomb for a tour. We were told not to reveal any trade secrets but I will try my best to give you details without getting in trouble. Bausch and Lomb specializes in designing and manufacturing contact lenses. Contact lenses have come a long way in the past 10 years because they have developed a material that will allow oxygen to pass through it just like water. They needed to be able to create a special material like this because the cornea of the eye does not have any blood vessels that bring oxygen to it. Bausch and Lomb created a permeable material for their contact lenses and has a completely sterilized system of machines that makes the lenses. In order to tour their facilities we had to wear gowns, hairnets, ear plugs, and wash our hands before walking into the room with all the machines. We weren't in that room for a large amount of time, thank goodness, because then we could take off the gowns and everything. They showed us a room where they tinker with different cameras and lenses and lighting and they showed us some really expensive lights that could distribute the light they emitted differently. We moved on into a room that looked sort of like an eye doctor's office. In a sense it was, but technically it was a research facility, in the middle of the room they had two machines. The first machine measured the "elevations" on the eye, comparing it to a "normal" eye (because they all generally have the same shape). We thanked them for giving us a tour and proceeded back to RIT. However, we did make a pit stop for lunch, then went back to work. When we got back, Tom, Kevin, Basma, and I went to the meeting that had already started and listened to Jake tell some of the Undergrads how to work with their program. All the standing and walking at Bausch and Lomb made me exhausted and I was practically ready to fall asleep, after the meeting we went back downstairs and I finished combining the rest of my UV and Optical images which you can look at by clicking the link that was on Day 10 of my blog. It's time for our 5 o'clock meeting and then I'm going home to sleep. Bye!