The Uses of Invention
Professor Ji-Xin Cheng Elected NAI Fellow
by A.J. Kleber
What is an inventor? It’s a term that doesn’t get a great deal of play in contemporary press; we’re more likely to discuss “innovators,” associating the prior term with a more old-fashioned milieu, the industrial, mechanical predecessor to our digital age. But where innovation may pursue endless flights of fancy, invention is a more practical form of the creative process: an inventor is a visionary with a productive imagination, an individual who not only has grand, paradigm-altering ideas, but also the patience, tenacity, and will to follow those ideas to a useful realization.
An inventor is someone who, for example, might design, patent, and bring to production an advanced microscope, which can be used as a tool for improved diagnosis and treatment decision-making; something like the UltraView microscope, which is already available and in clinical hands in China. The UltraView is just the latest in a long line of devices, techniques and breakthroughs by its inventor, Professor Ji-Xin Cheng, whose prolific and, perhaps above all, stunningly useful career has earned him a place in the National Academy of Inventors (NAI)’s 2025 class of Fellows.
“Seeing the Unseen”
With well over 30 patents to his name and several commercially produced devices actively in use in labs and clinics around the world, Professor Cheng has spent his career in pursuit of ever-advancing optical imaging technologies and techniques, primarily for applications in medicine and the life sciences. Cheng has largely specialized in pioneering microscopy methods, coherent Raman scattering (CRS) and mid-infrared photothermal (MIP) microscopy among them, which can provide extremely sensitive imaging of the chemical composition of life’s tiniest building blocks in a label-free manner.
Cheng’s microscopy advances have allowed researchers to image metabolic activity inside live tumor cells, visualize the chemical content of a single viral particle, study protein aggregation in Alzheimer’s disease, and identify distinct chemicals within organelles without using fluorescent dyes, among other applications. Some have even been applied to non-medical purposes, such as examining famous paintings or the tiny gaps in microchips. Understanding, diagnosing, and treating cancers have been a significant focus, but his scope is broad; he recently commented that he hopes his work may soon “decode the chemistry of life”.
Diverse methods and applications
Not limited to microscopy, Cheng’s inventions span a broad variety of medical technologies and approaches, from the use of microwave neuromodulation to treat epilepsy, distinguishing between RNA and DNA viruses with infrared, treating antibiotic-resistant MRSA with blue light and hydrogen peroxide, the development of an intravascular photoacoustic/ultrasound (IVPA/US) catheter to detect lipids indicative of cardiovascular disease, and AcouStar, a sensor patch which uses laser pulses to pinpoint the location of tiny tumors for removal from a human breast.
This dizzying array of innovations, all of them with practical, beneficial potential, are at every stage from the earliest experimental phase to the prototypical. With hundreds of peer-reviewed articles to his name, collaborations across disciplines and institutions, and financial support from the NIH, Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation, and others, Cheng’s inventive momentum shows no sign of slowing down. It’s easy to believe that, as he once noted, he is always thinking about research–when he drives, when he eats, “maybe even when I fall asleep.”
A well-earned honor
According to the NAI, their Fellows Program recognizes “significant impact on the innovation ecosystem, economic development, and society.” As researchers around the world take up the tools he has developed, companies commercialize his devices, and patients benefit from the insights his work continues to enable, Professor Cheng could hardly be a more qualified addition to their ranks.
The 2025 class of Fellows will be inducted at the NAI’s 15th Annual Conference in June, 2026.
Professor Ji-Xin Cheng is the inaugural Moustakas Chair Professor in Optoelectronics and Photonics, with appointments in ECE, BME, MSE, Physics, and Chemistry. His recent accolades include a 2024 Raman Award for Most Innovative Technological Development, a 2024 ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry Spectrochemical Analysis Award, a 2024 SPIE Biophotonics Technology Award, and the 2024 Charles DeLisi Award from the BU College of Engineering. A fellow of Optica and AIMBE, he was Boston University’s 2022 Innovator of the Year, and recently received a 2025 BU Ignition Award to develop yet another cutting-edge chemical microscope.