We are requesting funds to support participant costs for students, post-doctoral researchers, young faculty, and invited speakers for the Biophotonics Conference to be organized as part of the Great Lakes Photonics Symposium, to be held June 7-11, 2004 at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. It is being sponsored by the Air Force and SPIE, The International Society for Optical Engineering. It is expected that about 1000 people will attend the general symposium and 150 - 200 people will attend the sessions of the Biophotonics Conference. We expect that the general attendance will be mainly drawn from the Great Lakes region, but expect to draw speakers and some participants nationally and internationally. The major topic areas of the Biophotonics Conference are biomolecular spectroscopy, functional and structural imaging, advanced microscopy, nanophotonics, optical probes and devices, and photomedicine. The symposium is especially timely in that it will provide a forum for exchange of research results between international workers in biophotonics and the local biophotonics and biomedical research community, which has recently become more focused through the efforts of the Case Western Reserve University Biophotonics Initiative. It is anticipated that this will stimulate new collaborative biophotonics research and identify potential applications of photonics in biomedical research. In addition, the placement of the biophotonics symposium within the larger Great Lakes Photonics Symposium will provide a unique venue for cross fertilization between the broader optical science and engineering community and the local biomedical research community.