Monday, May 7 (morning):
Mikhail Shapiro, Caltech
"Proteins, air and water: reporter genes for ultrasound and MRI"
Mikhail Shapiro is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and a Heritage Principal Investigator at Caltech. He received his PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT and his BSc in Neuroscience from Brown, and was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Shapiro lab uses molecular engineering to develop methods to image and control the function of cells deep inside the body. Mikhail's awards include the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the Pew Scholarship, the Sontag Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award, the Packard Fellowship, and the Technology Review TR35 award for top innovators under age 35.
Lihong Wang, Caltech
"World’s Deepest-Penetration and Fastest Cameras: Photoacoustic Tomography and Compressed Ultrafast Photography"
Lihong Wang earned his Ph.D. degree at Rice University, Houston, Texas under the tutelage of Robert Curl, Richard Smalley, and Frank Tittel. He is Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. His book entitled “Biomedical Optics: Principles and Imaging,” one of the first textbooks in the field, won the 2010 Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award. He also edited the first book on photoacoustic tomography and coauthored a book on polarization. He has published 470 peer-reviewed articles in journals, including Nature (Cover story), Science, PNAS, and PRL, and has delivered 460 keynote, plenary, or invited talks. His Google Scholar h-index and citations have reached 118 and 58,000, respectively. His laboratory was the first to report functional photoacoustic tomography, 3D photoacoustic microscopy, photoacoustic endoscopy, photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, the photoacoustic Doppler effect, the universal photoacoustic reconstruction algorithm, microwaveinduced thermoacoustic tomography, ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, time-reversed ultrasonically encoded optical focusing, nonlinear photoacoustic wavefront shaping, compressed ultrafast photography (10 trillion frames/s, world’s fastest camera), Mueller-matrix optical coherence tomography, and optical coherence computed tomography. In particular, photoacoustic imaging broke through the long-standing diffusion limit on the penetration of optical microscopy and reached new depths for noninvasive biochemical, functional, and molecular imaging in living tissue at high resolution. He chairs the annual conference on Photons plus Ultrasound, the largest conference at Photonics West. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics. He received the NIH’s FIRST, NSF’s CAREER, NIH Director’s Pioneer, and NIH Director’s Transformative Research awards. He also received the OSA C.E.K. Mees Medal, IEEE Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Biomedical Engineering Award, SPIE Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award, Senior Prize of the International Photoacoustic and Photothermal Association, and OSA Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award. He is a Fellow of the AIMBE (American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering), Electromagnetics Academy, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), OSA (Optical Society of America), and SPIE (Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers). He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. An honorary doctorate was conferred on him by Lund University, Sweden.
Bruce Tromberg, UC Irvine
"Wearable and Bedside Biophotonics: Technologies at the intersection between personalized medicine and personal health"
Education: Ph.D., University of Tennessee, Chemistry, 1988; B.A., Vanderbilt University, Chemistry, 1979
Bruce Tromberg is director of the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic (BLI) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and principal investigator of the Laser Microbeam and Medical Program (LAMMP), an NIH P41 National Biomedical Technology Center in the BLI. He is a professor with joint appointments in the departments of biomedical engineering and surgery, co-leads the onco-imaging and biotechnology program in UCI’s NCI Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and he has been a member of the UCI faculty since 1990.
Tromberg's research spans the interdisciplinary fields of biophotonics and biomedical optics with particular emphasis on the development of new technologies for medical imaging and therapy. Major areas of activity include diffuse optical spectroscopy and imaging, nonlinear optical microscopy, and image-guided therapy. His work includes more than 400 total publications and 17 patents in biophotonics technologies and their application to problems in cancer, vascular disease, neuroscience and critical care. Tromberg serves on several national advisory committees, including the Experimental Imaging Sciences Committee for the American College of Radiology Imaging Networks (ACRIN) and is a former council member for the NIH National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). He has received several awards for his work, including the R&D 100 Award, the OE Magazine Technology Innovator Award, and the Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE).
Monday, May 7 (afternoon):
Cynthia Chestek, Univ. of Michigan
"High Density Carbon Fiber Microelectrode Arrays for MultiModal Neural Recording"
Cynthia A. Chestek received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 2005 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 2010. From 2010 to 2012, she was a Research Associate at the Stanford Department of Neurosurgery with the Braingate 2 clinical trial. In 2012 she became an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, where she runs the Cortical Neural Prosthetics Lab. The lab focuses on brain and nerve control of finger movements as well as to high-density carbon fiber electrode arrays. She is the author of 34 full length scientific articles. Her research interests include high-density interfaces to the nervous system for the control of multiple degree of freedom hand and finger movements.
Kaitlyn Crawford, Univ. of Central Florida
"Human Health Monitoring: Successes and Challenges for Wearable Sensors"
Kaitlyn Crawford is currently assistant professor at the University of Central Florida.
Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher with joint affiliation at the Northwestern University Center for Bio-integrated Electronics, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Department of Materials Science and Engineering, both within the research group of Prof. John Rogers. In the Rogers group, Dr. Crawford engaged in cross-disciplinary research that involves flexible electronics, materials chemistry, and engineering for use in a wide range of translational human health applications. She received her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Maryland, College Park in consultation with Prof. Lawrence Sita in 2015. Her doctoral work was focused on modulating the chemical architecture of polyolefin block copolymers for use as thermoplastic elastomers. Prior to that, Dr. Crawford received her M.S. in Chemistry at the North Carolina State University with Prof. Christopher Gorman in 2009 with research emphasis on biodegradable polymer brushes. She holds dual B.S. degrees in Chemistry and Psychology from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Over the years of academic training Dr. Crawford has received numerous awards in research and teaching, of which she is the recipient of the 2015 Board of Visitors Outstanding Graduate Research award from the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland – the highest graduate student accolade within that College.
Scott Fraser, USC (University of Southern California Los Angeles)
"Adding Dimensions to Intravital and Multimodal Microscopy"
Scott E. Fraser, Provost Professor, has a long-standing commitment to quantitative biology, applying the tools of chemistry, engineering, and physics to problems in biology and medicine. His personal research centers on imaging and molecular analyses of intact biological systems, with an emphasis on studies of early animal development, organogenesis, and medical diagnostics.
After receiving training in physics (BS, Harvey Mudd College, 1976) and biophysics (PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 1979), Fraser joined the faculty at UC Irvine, and rose through the ranks to become Chair of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. In 1990 he moved to Caltech to serve as the Anna L. Rosen Professor of Biology, and the Director of the Biological Imaging Center. He is deeply committed to interdisciplinary training and translational research, having helped to found the Caltech Brain Imaging Center and the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, as well as serving as the Director of the Rosen Center for Biological Engineering. To foster the translation of basics science research findings to application in clinical practice, Fraser has actively collaborated with clinicians in fields ranging from cardiology to ophthalmology. Such interactions have helped translate his 80 issued patents to FDA approved tests, novel research tools, and start-up companies.In Fall 2012, Fraser moved to USC to take a Provost Professorship in the Dornsife College of Letters Arts and Sciences, the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Keck School of Medicine and the Viterbi School of Engineering. He remains active in interdisciplinary research and serves as the Director of Science Initiatives for the USC campuses.
Tuesday, May 8:
Melissa Skala, Morgridge Institute for Research, Wisconsin
"Monitoring single cell behavior"
Melissa Skala received her BS in Physics at Washington State University in 2002, her M.S. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2004, and her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University in 2007. Her postdoctoral training was also in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, from 2007-2010. From 2010-2016, she was an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Since 2016 she has been an Investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research, and an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Andrew Bartko, Battelle Memorial Inst.
"Spectroscopic Microbial Identification"
Andrew Bartko, Research Leader, Battelle Memorial Institute
Dr. Andrew P. Bartko received a B.S. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 2002. His graduate work consisted of deciphering spatially heterogeneous relaxation dynamics of glass forming systems using novel rotational single molecule microscopy techniques. In 2002, Dr. Bartko joined the Softmatter Nanotechnology and Advanced Spectroscopy Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory where he studied the ultrafast photophysics of semiconducting quantum dots. Dr. Bartko is a senior scientist in Battelle’s Technology Development Group where he contributes to several applied spectroscopy efforts that focus on biological and chemical sensing. Dr. Bartko is the manager and technical leader of an interdisciplinary team that is developing Battelle’s Resource Effective Bioidentification System (REBS). Rapid microbial sensing capabilities of REBS have been shown to have practical and strategic importance where rapid, accurate and precise microbial contamination control is required. Dr. Bartko has developed several rapid microbial control applications for industries such as defense, security and industrial market sectors.
Lidong Qin, Houston Methodist
"Cell- and Biomarker-Based Assays on Microfluidics Chips"
Lidong Qin received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois and completed a postdoctoral traineeship in Cancer Nanotechnology at the California Institute of Technology. In Prof. Chad Mirkin's lab at the Northwestern University, Dr. Qin worked on functional metallic nanorods, with the invention of on-wire lithography and the development of Raman spectrum-based imaging and sensing methods. His research provided insightful understanding of Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy and Surface Plasmon Resonance, which are the basics of Raman-based cancer imaging and nanomaterial-based cancer thermal therapeutics. Because of his pioneering work in metal nanomaterial synthesis and biological applications, he was awarded the International Precious Metal Institute (IPMI) graduate student prize. His other awards include the Materials Research Society graduate student award, Chinese government award for graduate students studying abroad, and Searle center for teaching excellence award. During his four years at Northwestern University, Dr. Qin received eight patents and published fourteen peer-reviewed journal articles, in journals including Science, PNAS, JACS and Nano Letters.
Later, Dr. Qin moved to Caltech as a postdoctoral fellow, working with Prof. James Heath. He developed automatic proteomic barcode chips that allow highly multiplexed plasma cancer biomarker measurements from a finger-prick of blood. Dr. Qin's method is recognized as a significant improvement over the cost and speed of standard laboratory tests to analyze proteins in blood. In his three-year postdoctoral research position, he also worked on integrated microfluidic chips to handle prostate cancer cell culture and study proteomic profiles from individual cells. He continued to excel and make major contributions to his field, receiving another patent and publishing three peer-reviewed papers in Nature Nanotechnology, Lab on a Chip and Nature Biotechnology. Dr. Qin joined the TMHRI Department of Nanomedicine in July 2010 and was awarded with a prestigious startup award, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award for first-time, tenure-track faculty.