Prof. Dr. Andrew BERGER
Andrew Berger, Associate Professor of Optics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, USA, is visiting the Abbe School of Photonics as a Visiting Professor in the Winter term 2013/14. During his stay he will give a series of lectures.
Andrew Berger is an Associate Professor of Optics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, USA, where he has been on the faculty since 2000. He holds physics degrees from Yale (B.S., 1991) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1998). At the latter, Dr. Berger did his doctoral work in the G.R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory under Michael Feld, developing methods of blood analysis using laser spectroscopy. Prior to coming to the Institute of Optics at Rochester, he spent two years at the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Center in Irvine, CA, building handheld systems to analyze breast tissue content, thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship from the George E. Hewitt Foundation for Medical Research.
Professor Berger's area of interest is biomedical optics, specifically spectroscopic diagnostic techniques. His group's present research includes transcutaneous Raman spectroscopy of bones, multimodal single-cell microscopy (Raman plus elastic scatter), and near-infrared spectroscopy of hemodynamics in the human brain. Most recently, Prof. Berger has also begun an optics-education research project, interviewing students about mathematical and conceptual understanding of electromagnetic plane waves.
website of Andrew BergerExternal link
Lecture 1: Medical Adventures in the Near-Infrared
Time: December 17, 2013, 14:00
Place: IPHT conference room, Albert-Einstein-Str. 9, 07745 Jena
Light in the near-infrared regime has many desirable properties for biomedical studies: it penetrates unusually deeply into many tissues, it generates much less fluorescence than visible or ultraviolet light, and its wavelength is on the same scale as many cellular organelles. These properties of near-infrared light have been leveraged in my research group (a) to detect activity in human brains, (b) to classify cells based upon organelle size changes, and (c) to detect healthy and diseased mouse bones without removing the overlying skin.
Lecture 2: Turbid Tissue Optics I: Introduction
Time: January 7, 2014, 14:00
Place: IPHT conference room, Albert-Einstein-Str. 9, 07745 Jena
Most of the human body is made of tissues that strongly scatter visible and near-infrared light. Light propagation in such tissues is therefore turbid (chaotic) on the scale of millimeters. Here we will introduce the basic concepts for describing this light propagation, and we will identify clinically-important parameters that can be measured despite-or because of-turbidity.
Lecture 3: Turbid Tissue Optics II: Instrumentation and Measurements
Time: January 14, 2014, 14:00
Place: IPHT conference room, Albert-Einstein-Str. 9, 07745 Jena
Turbid tissues are interrogated using all sorts of optical sources and detectors. The incident light may be steady (continuous-wave), pulsed, or sinusoidally amplitude-modulated. Remitted light may be detected at one location or at many, with various levels of spectral and spatial resolution (including none). We will discuss how to construct various measurement systems and how much tissue information can be extracted using each one.
Lecture 4: Turbid Tissue Optics III: Applications
Time: January 21, 2014, 14:00
Place: IPHT conference room, Albert-Einstein-Str. 9, 07745 Jena
Many clinical and/or research measurements can be made in turbid tissues. In order to study the details of such approaches, we will discuss a particular application: near-infrared absorption spectroscopy of cerebral hemodynamics. Full appreciation of this application combines many concepts in turbid tissue optics and spectroscopy, without involving any sophisticated mathematics. Other applications with similar technology will also be presented.
Lecture 5: A Different View of Turbidity: Elastic Scattering Analysis
Time: January 28, 2014, 14:00
Place: IPHT conference room, Albert-Einstein-Str. 9, 07745 Jena
The optical turbidity of biological tissues is caused by scattering, and in many imaging and spectroscopy applications the goal is to make the scattering "go away". But the angular and spectral properties of light scattering also encode valuable information about structures on the scale of an optical wavelength-which conveniently matches the size of cellular organelles. We will discuss how angularly and spectrally-resolved scattering measurements can provide nanometer-scale sensitivity to size changes in the contents of cells.