Lihong Wang, PhD, a world-renowned innovator in biomedical optics and imaging, has been awarded the 2015 Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award from SPIE for his pioneering technical contributions and visionary leadership in the development and application of photoacoustic tomography, photoacoustic microscopy and photon transport modeling.
Wang, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professorship of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, will receive his award in February at SPIE Photonics West 2015 in San Francisco.
The award is presented annually by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, in recognition of outstanding lifetime contributions to the field of biomedical optics through the development of innovative, high-impact technologies.
Wang is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics. The book Biomedical Optics: Principles and Imaging, co-written by Wang and Hsin-I Wu, won the 2010 Joseph W. Goodman Book Award and was recognized as the most practical text in the field in the Britton Chance Award citation.
Photoacoustic tomography is expected to impact biology and medicine broadly by providing multiscale in vivo functional and molecular imaging of structures ranging from subcellular organelles to organs, enabling a noninvasive look at subcutaneous tissue at the deepest level to date.
Wang’s laboratory invented or discovered a variety of new technologies, including functional photoacoustic tomography, 3-D photoacoustic microscopy, the photoacoustic Doppler effect, photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing and many others.
SPIE is an international society for optics and photonics, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies.
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