CISE Faculty Affiliate Lei Tian Wins NSF CAREER Award
CISE Faculty Affiliate Professor Lei Tian (ECE, BME) received a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his work on Optical Intensity Diffraction Tomography with Multiple Scattering. Professor Tian’s research involves the development of novel optical imaging devices that overcome barriers to studying biological samples and phenomena.
This project focuses on tomography, a powerful technique that has found wide applications in life sciences and medical diagnosis. Optical tomography is particularly attractive since it is noninvasive and uses non-ionizing radiation. Recent development to optical tomography focuses on pushing the imaging depth, as motivated by many important needs including deep tissue imaging and brain photostimulations. However, existing optical tomography devices can only provide high-resolution imaging up to ~100 microns, limited by the single-scattering approximation.
Professor Tian will use his NSF CAREER Award to overcome this limitation by advancing both fundamental theory and practical devices. The research will establish novel multiple-scattering based tomography models that allow efficiently utilizing the information contained in the multiply scattered light. A new type of optical devices based on the intensity diffraction tomography will be developed with simple experimental setups to facilitate easy adoption to existing microscope systems.
The outcome of Professor Tian’s program can enable scientific and biomedical discoveries by providing means to study biological samples and phenomena that would be otherwise not accessible, in areas such as histology, cytometry, brain mapping, and drug discovery. In addition, the research subject will be translated to a new “Innovation in a Box” hands-on curriculum and disseminated broadly to middle and high-school students through the Boston University Technology Innovation Scholars Program. The education program will focus on raising both interest and knowledge of STEM subjects and providing multidisciplinary training to graduate, undergraduate, and high-school students with diverse background, in particular women, minorities, and historically under-represented groups.
NSF CAREER Awards support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Read more information about Professor Lei Tian’s NSF CAREER Award here.
Professor Lei Tian heads the Computational Imaging Systems Lab at BU. His research focuses on developing novel imaging and microscopy techniques for biomedical and nanometrology applications, including computational imaging and sensing, computational microscopy, imaging in scattering media, phase retrieval and neurophotonics.
In addition to receiving the NSF CAREER Award, Professor Tian has received the Boston University College of Engineering Dean’s Catalyst Award, 2018, Hariri Institute Research Incubation Award, 2019, and The Fumio Okano Best 3D Paper Prize in 2018. He has also received the Boston University Nanotechnology Pilot Grant Award in 2017. He is a member of OSA, SPIE, and the Topical Editor of Applied Optics. His research interests are in the area of computational imaging and sensing, computational microscopy, imaging in scattering media, phase retrieval and neurophotonics.