Keynote Speakers

Dr. Thomas W. Bocklitz

Dr. Thomas W. Bocklitz studied physics at the university of Jena, and he received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry/chemometrics from the same university in 2011. In 2013 he became head of a junior research group “Statistical Modelling and Image Analysis” at the university of Jena. Since 2019 he is head of the research department “Photonic data science” at the Leibniz IPHT. His main research area is closely connected with the photonic data life cycle, which contains machine learning and chemometrics based modeling of photonic data. He has published more than 121 publications in peer reviewed journals and gave more than 50 invited talks on conferences. The work of Thomas Bocklitz was award with prestigious awards, like the Kaiser-Friedrich research-award in 2018 and the Bruce Kowalski award in 2015.

Prof. Ji-Xin Cheng, Ph.D.

• Primary AppointmentProfessor, Department of Biomedical Engineering; Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• EducationPhD, University of Science and Technology of China, 1998
• Additional AffiliationsDivision of Materials Science and Engineering
  Department of Chemistry
  Department of Physics
  Neurophotonics Center
  Photonics Center
• Honors and Awards2020: Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award from Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh
  2019: Ellis R. Lippincott Award from OSA, Society for Applied Spectroscopy, Coblentz Society
  2019: Fellow of Optical Society of America
  2017: Inaugural Moustakas Chair Professor in Optoelectronics and Photonics, Boston University
  2016: Purdue University College of Engineering Research Excellence Award
  2015: Craver Award from Coblentz Society
  2014: Fellow of American Institute of Medicine and Biological Engineering (AIMBE)
• Areas of InterestMolecular spectroscopic imaging technologies
  Label-free microscopy
  Medical Photonics
  Neurophotonics
  Cancer metabolism
  Photonics for infectious diseases

Prof Senada Koljenović

Currently Professor and Head of the Pathology department, and Consultant Pathologist at University Hospital Antwerp/ University of Antwerp (Belgium), where she mainly focuses on Head and Neck pathology and Dermatopathology.

Within Head and Neck pathology, she works intensively on improving surgical-pathological communication and correlation of information for better diagnosis, surgical results and patient outcome. Co-chair of Dutch Head & Neck Pathology Working group.

She is pathologist-PI within a multidisciplinary research group including and the Departments of Pathology, ENT and Head and Neck surgery, Maxillofacial and Head and Neck surgery, Dermatology. She furthermore coordinates close collaboration with other national and international academic centers and affiliated non-academic institutes, to facilitate design and conduction of large multi-center studies.

Research is translational with focus on applications of Raman spectroscopy-based tools in Head and Neck surgery (Raman-guided surgical resections facilitating safe surgical margins in oral cancer) and in characterisation of pre-neoplasia for its’s early diagnosis.

Moreover, she focuses on histological, clinical and molecular aspects of pre-neoplasia and is conducting extensive study on histological diagnosis (and classification) of pre-neoplasia in head and neck region and other sites (e.g. vulva) and potential role of immunohistochemical markers in aiding the diagnosis. Assessment of existence of differentiated type of dysplasia in oral cavity is one of the main subjects.

Prof. Anita Mahadevan-Jansen

Dr. Mahadevan-Jansen translates optical techniques for clinical detection of tissue physiology and pathology. Her primary research at the Vanderbilt Biophotonics Center, is to investigate the applications of optical spectroscopies and imaging for disease diagnosis and guidance of therapy. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Bombay (Mumbai), India, and a master’s and PhD degrees in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She joined the Vanderbilt engineering faculty in 1996. She is currently the Orrin H. Ingram Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University and holds a secondary appointment in the Departments of Neurological Surgery and Otolaryngology. She is the founding Director of the Vanderbilt Biophotonics Center, a collaborative research center that is focused on the development and translation of light and light-based technologies.

She is the current Vice President of SPIE, the International Society of Optics and Photonics and on its presidential chain to be President in 2022. She is a fellow of SPIE, Optical Society of America (OSA), American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and was recently inducted into the National Academy of Inventors.

Prof Frederic Leblond

Frederic Leblond, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Engineering Physics at Polytechnique Montreal and Director of the Laboratory for Radiological Optics (LRO). He is also a research scientist at the CRCHUM medical research center and co-founder of the company ODS Medical (now Reveal Surgical) founded in 2015.

Prof. Leblond is a physicist and engineer with a Google H-index of 35, over 100 publications, more than a dozen patent applications and more than 200 conference proceedings to date. He is a Full Professor at Polytechnique Montreal and leads a research laboratory there and at CRCHUM. His lab is currently composed of 18 members, including graduate students, postdocs and research professionals.

Prof. Leblond holds research grants from organizations such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Fonds de recherche Nature et technologies du Québec (FRQNT) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

Prof. Leblond holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics from Polytechnique Montreal, a Master’s degree in Physics from Laval University and a PhD in Physics from McGill University. After his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. He was then a senior researcher for three years and worked on the development of medical instruments at a Montreal medical imaging company. Prior to joining Polytechnique, Professor Leblond was a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, for five years, where he was also affiliated with the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Dr. Leblond’s research is related to the development of light-based medical devices to characterize biological tissues to improve the accuracy and safety of surgical procedures, as well as to develop techniques to improve the accuracy of medical diagnostics.

Prof Molly Stevens

Prof Molly M Stevens FREng FRS is Professor of Biomedical Materials and Regenerative Medicine and the Research Director for Biomedical Material Sciences in the Department of Materials, in the Department of Bioengineering and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London.

Prof Stevens’ multidisciplinary research balances the investigation of fundamental science with the development of technology to address some of the major healthcare challenges. Her work has been instrumental in elucidating the bio-material interfaces. She has created a broad portfolio of designer biomaterials for applications in disease diagnostics and regenerative medicine. Her substantial body of work influences research groups around the world with over 30 major awards for the groups research and Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher in Cross-Field research.

Prof. Stevens holds numerous leadership positions including Director of the UK Regenerative Medicine Platform “Smart Acellular Materials” Hub, Deputy Director of the EPSRC IRC in Early-Warning Sensing Systems for Infectious Diseases and has previously served as President of the Royal Society of Chemistry Division of Materials Chemistry.

Invited Speakers

Prof. Achim Kohler

Achim Kohler obtained his PhD in theoretical physics in 1998. After his PhD he has been working for almost 15 years at Nofima, The Norwegian Institute of Food Fisheries and Aquaculture Research in Norway, where he developed vibrational spectroscopy and related data analysis techniques for food quality and safety analysis. He is currently a professor in physics at the faculty of Science and Technology at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, in Ås, Norway. Prof. Kohler and his BioSpec group have been keen on understanding and modelling of scattering and absorption in vibrational spectroscopy since almost two decades. His group is highly multidisciplinary combining data science methods with approaches from physics for modelling and understanding of optical effects in biological materials.

Dr Matthew J Baker

Inventor with 18+ years’ experience in the field of clinical spectroscopy. Top 6 KMPG Best British Tech Pioneers (2020), Fellowship of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy (2020), Top 40 under 40 Analytical Scientists (2018), RSC Harrison Meldola Prize (2017) and Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy (2016).

Prof. Dr. Ferenc Krausz

Ferenc Krausz (born 1962 in Mór/Hungary) earned his degree in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University Budapest (1985). He completed his doctorate in Laser Physics at the Technische Universität (TU) Vienna (1991) where he habilitated in the same research field in 1993, took up assistant professorship in 1998 and full professorship in 1999. In 2003 Ferenc Krausz was appointed Director of the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching. In October 2004 he became professor at the Faculty of Physics of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich and has since then held the Chair of Experimental Physics – Laser Physics.

In a series of experiments performed between 2001 and 2004 Ferenc and his team succeeded in producing and measuring attosecond light pulses and applying them for the first real-time observation of atomic-scale electronic motions. These achievements earned him the reputation as the co-founder (along with Paul Corkum) of the field of Attosecond Physics, a scientific discipline devoted to real-time observation and control of electron phenomena, as also acknowledged by their selection as 2015 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates. More recently, he turned his attention to capitalizing on ultrafast laser techniques for disease detection by the molecular fingerprinting of human bio-fluids. For his contributions to ultrafast science, Ferenc Krausz shared the 2013 King-Faisal Prize for Science with Dr. Paul Corkum and the 2022 Wolf Prize in Physics with Prof. Anne L’Huillier and Dr. Paul Corkum.

Dr. Mihaela Žigman

Mihaela Žigman is a trained molecular cell biologist. She studied at the University of Ljubljana and received her PhD in molecular biology from the University of Vienna. After her post-doctoral research at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in Seattle, and guiding a small team at the University of Heidelberg, she moved to Munich.

Mihaela’s utter fascination for technology-driven approaches ultimately led her become research group leader of the inter-disciplinary Broadband InfraRed Diagnostics (BIRD) team at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich where laser physics is approaching medical diagnostics. Her target is to evaluate electric-field molecular fingerprinting as a new in vitro medical diagnostic platform, to probe molecular phenotypes for detecting earliest transitions from health to disease.

Prof Ute Neugebauer

Ute Neugebauer is professor at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Department leader at the Leibniz-Institute of Photonic Technology, Deputy Scientific Director at the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology and in the Executive committee of the Core Facility Jena Biophotonic and Imaging Laboratory (JBIL). Her research focusses on clinical spectroscopic diagnostics with the aim to develop novel spectroscopic tools and methods for medical diagnostics and the characterization of physiological interactions with a special focus on infection and sepsis. Together with her research team and collaborators she received a Gold Medal at the International Trade Fair “Ideas – Inventions – Innovations” (2016), the 3rd prize Berthold Leibinger Innovationspreis (2018), and the Thuringian Research Award for Applied Research (2019). Ute Neugebauer holds a Masters diploma in chemistry, PhD in Physical Chemistry and habilitation in Medical Photonics.

Prof Karen Faulds

Karen Faulds is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde is an expert in the development of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and Raman techniques for novel analytical detection strategies, in particular multiplexed bioanalytical applications. She has published over 160 publications and her Groups research has been recognised through multiple awards, most recently the Robert Kellner Award Lecture (2021) and the RSC Analytical Division Mid-Career Award (2021).. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Society for Applied Spectroscopy and Royal Society of Edinburgh. She is Chair of the Infrared and Raman Discussion Group (IRDG), an elected member of the RSC Analytical Division Council and the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS) Governing Board. She is an Associate Editor for Analyst and serves on the editorial board of RSC Advances and Analyst and advisory board for Chemical Society Reviews.