BIO-NANO-PHOTONICS LAB

Research Objectives:

Studies of static and dynamic optical properties of mesoscopic to nanoscopic optical disordered media, such as biological cells/tissues.  In particular, the development of optical tools and techniques to understand the biological processes within a single cell to tissue. The main focus is on using biophotonics methods to understand and detect disease processes such as the progression of early cancer and abnormalities in brain cells/tissues.

​

Important techniques and instrumentations developed by my group:

• Enhanced spectroscopic microscopy technique to probe nanoscale structures of cells and tissues.

• Low coherence backscattering technique for depth selective scattering probing.

• Delay time spectroscopy technique to detect abnormalities in cells/tissues.

• Super-resolution microscopy to understand biological nanostructures.

• High-throughput and fiber optics technology development for early cancer detection.

• Photonics technique to probe light localization in cells for detection of cancer stages.

• Speckle spectroscopic technique for ultra-rheological characterization of bio-fluids.

• Raman and spectroscopic microscopy to simultaneous structure and chemical detection.

​

Commercially available instruments that we are using:

• Electron Microscopy (EM),

• Confocal microscopy,

• Two-photon microscopy,

• Optical coherence tomography (OCT).

Large-scale numerical simulations and analytical calculations to support our experiments:

• Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method,

• Molecular Dynamics,

• and Brownian Dynamics simulations are used to support our experimental results.