Biomedical Optics Experimental Lab

Mentor Areas

Professor Yodh’s current interests span fundamental and applied questions in condensed matter physics, medical and biophysics, and the optical sciences. Areas of ongoing research include: soft materials, complex fluids and networks, carbon nanotubes, laser spectroscopy, optical microscopy & micromanipulation, biomedical optics, functional imaging and spectroscopy of living tissues, photodynamic therapy and nonlinear optics.

Description:

Students will work on biomedical optics projects that typically employ light (diffuse light) to measure physiological properties of tissues. Research ranges from pre-clinical and clinical studies to development of instrumentation and software.

We are interested in probing the hemodynamic and metabolic responses of various tissue (brain, breast, muscle) and in various contexts (cancer diagnosis and therapies, brain injury and function, peripheral arterial disease, etc.).

Much of the research involves experimental tools of optics including light transport in tissue, laser spectroscopy, electro-optics, RF electronics, and correlation spectroscopy and/or theory (e.g., inverse problems, diffuse optical analysis), and/or physiology (characterization of diseased/normal states, etc.)

http://www.physics.upenn.edu/yodhlab/

Preferred Qualifications

Students at all levels will be considered, but knowledge of basic physics, chemistry, biology and computation/math will be useful. Students will typically join in an ongoing PhD or Post-doc project; they will learn about and carry out experiments and analysis.

Sometimes this research leads to publications. Work is often easiest to carry out in the summer, but we will also consider students for work during the school year.