Neurophotonics and Biomedical Spectroscopy

Robert A. Alfano is Distinguished Professor and Fellow at The City College of City University of New York, USA. He is also an Optical Society of America; Fellow, and a Fellow of IEEE. He has been involved in developing ultrafast laser spectroscopic techniques and applications of these techniques to study ultrafast dynamical processes in physical, chemical, and biological systems. His research encompasses the study and development of supercontinuum, tunable solid-state lasers, nonlinear optical processes, application of optical spectroscopic techniques for medical diagnosis (optical biopsy), study of photon migration in turbid media, and development of optical imaging techniques for biomedical imaging (optical mammography). He has published more than 700 papers and holds 102 patents.Lingyan Shi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. She is developing and applying new ultrafast laser scanning optical imaging and spectroscopic technologies, such as stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy for solving biological questions. Her recent major scientific contributions include the discovery of the "Golden Optical Window” for deep brain imaging, and the development of a breakthrough platform that combines deuterium probing with SRS for optical imaging of metabolic dynamics in living organisms. She is combining bioorthogonal labeling and SRS imaging for directly visualizing complex molecular events in brain, tumor, and metabolic diseases at sub-cellular scale in situ, which offer powerful tools potentially for disease detection, diagnosis and treatment, as well as for mechanistic understanding of scientific fundamentals. Shi is a member of OSA, SPIE, and also a member of New York Academy of Science.