FEATURED AUTHOR

Lihong Wang

Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor, Director, Imaging Division
Washington University in St. Louis

I am the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. I was honored to edit the first book on photoacoustic tomography, entitled “Photoacoustic Imaging and Spectroscopy.” The annual conference on this topic has been doubling in size approximately every three years since 2003 and has become the largest in SPIE’s Photonics West as of 2009.

Biography

Lihong Wang earned his Ph.D. degree at Rice University, Houston, Texas under the tutelage of Robert Curl, Richard Smalley, and Frank Tittel. He currently holds the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professorship of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. His book entitled “Biomedical Optics: Principles and Imaging,” one of the first textbooks in the field, won the 2010 Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award. He also coauthored a book on polarization and edited the first book on photoacoustic tomography. Professor Wang has published 333 peer-reviewed journal articles and delivered 357 keynote, plenary, or invited talks. His Google Scholar h-index and citations have reached 74 and over 21,900, respectively. His laboratory invented or discovered functional photoacoustic tomography, 3D photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), the photoacoustic Doppler effect, photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, focused scanning microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography, the universal photoacoustic or thermoacoustic reconstruction algorithm, frequency-swept ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing, sonoluminescence tomography, Mueller-matrix optical coherence tomography, optical coherence computed tomography, and oblique-incidence reflectometry. In particular, PAM broke through the long-standing diffusion limit to the penetration of conventional optical microscopy and reached super-depths for noninvasive biochemical, functional, and molecular imaging in living tissue at high resolution. His Monte Carlo model of photon transport in scattering media is used worldwide. He has received 33 research grants as the principal investigator with a cumulative budget of over $39M. Professor Wang is a Fellow of the AIMBE (American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering), OSA (Optical Society of America), IEEE, and SPIE. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics. He chairs the annual conference on Photons plus Ultrasound, and chaired the 2010 Gordon Conference on Lasers in Medicine and Biology and the 2010 OSA Topical Meeting on Biomedical Optics. He is a chartered member on an NIH Study Section. Wang serves as the founding chairs of the scientific advisory boards for two companies commercializing his inventions. He received NIH’s FIRST, NSF’s CAREER, and NIH Director’s Pioneer awards. He was awarded OSA’s C.E.K. Mees Medal and IEEE’s Technical Achievement Award for “seminal contributions to photoacoustic tomography and Monte Carlo modeling of photon transport in biological tissues and for leadership in the international biophotonics community.”

Education

Ph.D., Rice University, Houston, Texas, 1992

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Websites

Optical Imaging Lab

Books

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