The four KSOP research areas are organized according to the needs in education and the existing strengths of the research programs at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). We have structured KSOP along the following four research areas: Photonic Materials & Devices, Advanced Spectroscopy, Biomedical Photonics and Optical Systems. All research areas are strongly interlinked and most institutes feature research projects in more than one of the research areas. The following paragraphs give a brief introduction into these research areas.