Director

Lihong Wang earned his Ph.D. degree at Rice University, Houston, Texas under the tutelage of Robert Curl, Richard Smalley, and Frank Tittel. He is Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Medical Engineering Leadership Chair, and Executive Officer (aka Department Chair) of Medical Engineering at California Institute of Technology. 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 edited the first book on photoacoustic tomography. He has published 590 peer-reviewed articles in journals, including Nature (Cover story), Science, PNAS, and PRL, and has delivered 580 keynote, plenary, or invited talks. His Google Scholar h-index and citations have reached 152 and 100K, respectively. His laboratory was the first to report in vivo/functional photoacoustic tomography (top 2 cited in photoacoustics), 3D photoacoustic microscopy (top 2 cited in photoacoustics), photoacoustic endoscopy, photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, the photoacoustic Doppler effect, the universal photoacoustic reconstruction algorithm (widely adopted), microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography, ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, time-reversed ultrasonically encoded optical focusing, light-speed compressed ultrafast photography (219 trillion frames/s, world's fastest real-time camera), and open-source Monte Carlo simulation of light transport in tissues (widely cited, celebrated by the Journal of Biomedical Optics in 2022). Photoacoustic imaging broke through the long-standing diffusion limit on the penetration of optical imaging, providing the only technology for noninvasive multiscale biochemical, functional, and molecular imaging from organelles to humans at high resolution. The technology has been commercialized by dozens of companies for both preclinical and clinical imaging (FDA approved for breast imaging). He chairs the annual conference on Photons plus Ultrasound, the largest conference at the annual 20,000-attendee Photonics West. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics. He received the NSF CAREER, NIH FIRST, NIH Director's Pioneer, NIH Director's Transformative Research, and NIH/NCI Outstanding Investigator awards. He also received the OSA C.E.K. Mees Medal, IEEE Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Biomedical Engineering Award, SPIE Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award, IPPA Senior Prize, and OSA Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award for "seminal contributions" to photoacoustic tomography and light-speed imaging. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, AIMBE, Electromagnetics Academy, IAMBE, IEEE, OSA, and SPIE as well as a Foreign Fellow of COS. An honorary doctorate was conferred on him by Lund University, Sweden. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors and the National Academy of Engineering.