Although the BiOS Expo closes on Sunday, February 8, 2015, the conferences of the Biomedical Optics Symposium (BiOS) will continue through the week. So will other life sciences-focused happenings at SPIE Photonics West 2015.
BiOS is organized into five tracks: Photonic Therapeutics and Diagnostics; Clinical Technologies and Systems; Nano/Biophotonics; Tissue Optics, Laser-Tissue Interaction and Tissue Engineering; and Biomedical Spectroscopy, Microscopy and Imaging. In addition, two other topic areas fall under the BiOS umbrella: 3D Printing and Translational Research. The latter is a virtual symposium that includes presentations in all five tracks—on technologies, tools, and techniques that show high potential to improve healthcare practice.
On Monday, February 9, the Lasers and Photonics Marketplace Seminar will feature a talk by Gary Tearney, MD, Ph.D., of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School.
Also on Monday, three prizes will be awarded to early career scientists through the JenLab Young Investigator Award (9:35 am) and the Student Poster Session Competition (2:50 pm), both of which are part of the Multiphoton Microscopy in the Biomedical Sciences conference; and the Ocean Optics Young Investigator Award (6:10 pm), in conjunction with the Colloidal Nanocrystals for Biomedical Applications conference. (Two other awards programs, the PicoQuant Young Investigator Award—part of the Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Superresolution Imaging conference—and the Seno Medical Best Paper Awards part of the Photons Plus Ultrasound conference— run on Sunday at 3:25 pm and Tuesday at 5:40 pm, respectively.)
Three more plenary sessions will take place on Tuesday, February 10. In the Nano/Biophotonics plenary (10:30 am), Gabriel Popescu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will discuss the use of optics to bridge molecular and cellular biology, and present some recent advances in phase-sensitive measurements. The Neurophotonics plenary (2 pm), delivered by 2013 Nobel Laureate Thomas C. Südhof of the Stanford University School of Medicine, will describe recent studies showing how dysfunction of neurexins and their ligands might predispose to neuropsychiatric disorders. And the evening plenary, hosted by the International Biomedical Optics Society group (which aims to facilitate communications between clinicians and engineers), will feature a talk by Stephen Boppart of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Transforming Medicine and Surgery with Biophotonics.
Barbara Gefvert | Editor-in-Chief, BioOptics World (2008-2020)
Barbara G. Gefvert has been a science and technology editor and writer since 1987, and served as editor in chief on multiple publications, including Sensors magazine for nearly a decade.