SC182 Biomedical Optical Diagnostics and Sensing

Monday, March 22, 2010
1:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m.
Thomas Huser; Univ. of California at Davis, USA
Level: Advanced Beginner (basic understanding of topic is necessary to follow course material)


Course Description

This course provides an introduction to the basics of life sciences, followed by an introduction to the basic properties of photons and the spectroscopic properties of biological materials, i.e. absorbance, reflectance, polarization, fluorescence and light scattering. Modern optical imaging techniques—based on fluorescence, vibrational and nonlinear concepts—and their medical applications will be discussed.


Benefits and Learning Objectives

This course should enable you to:

  • List biologically relevant processes.
  • Describe the composition of typical mammalian cells and how they can be imaged and analyzed in vivo.
  • Define the best optical tools for the study of biological processes.
  • Provide assistance in the design, construction and application of optical techniques to biological systems.
  • Suggest and specify techniques that specifically highlight parts of interest within biological cells by employing optical tags.
  • Read optical spectroscopic signatures of cells and discuss them in a meaningful way.

Intended Audience

This course in intended for technicians in industrial, academic and government laboratories; graduate students; managers in biotech and optical industries; postdoctoral fellows; optics researchers or teachers interested in the life sciences.


Biography

Thomas Huser is an associate professor in the department of internal medicine and the chief scientist for the NSF Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST) at the University of California at Davis. Until November 2005, he was a group leader for biophotonics and nanospectroscopy at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL). He obtained his doctorate in physics from the University of Basel, Switzerland, where he worked on near-field optical microscopy. At the University of California at Davis he applies fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy to biological and medical problems at the single molecule to single cell level.