Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Biography
Lihong Wang earned his Ph.D. degree at Rice University, Houston, Texas under the tutelage of
Robert Curl,
Richard Smalley, and
Frank Tittel and 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 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 more than 333 peer-reviewed journal articles with an h-index of 74 (
Google Scholar) and delivered over 357 keynote, plenary, or invited talks.
He has received 33 research grants as the principal investigator with a cumulative budget of $39M. Professor Wang is a Fellow of the AIMBE, OSA, 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 served as a chartered member on an NIH Study Section. Wang is 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.”
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Research
His laboratory invented or discovered functional photoacoustic tomography, dark-field confocal photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), optical-resolution PAM, 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 as a standard tool.