Dr. Gabriel Popescu, Ph.D.

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Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Professor Gabriel Popescu (1973-2022) received his B.S. and M.S. in Physics from University of Bucharest, in 1995 and 1996, respectively. He obtained his M.S. in Optics in 1999 and Ph.D. in Optics in 2002 from the School of Optics/ CREOL (now the College of Optics and Photonics), University of Central Florida. Dr. Popescu continued his training with the G. R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory at MIT, working as a postdoctoral associate. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in August 2007 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and held a full faculty appointment with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He was also an affiliate faculty in the Bioengineering Department. Dr. Popescu received the 2009 NSF CAREER Award, was the 2012 Innovation Discovery Finalist selected by the Office of Technology Management Office, UIUC, and was elected as the 2012-2013 Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at UIUC. Dr. Popescu was an Associate Editor of Optics Express and Biomedical Optics Express, and Editorial Board Member for Journal of Biomedical Optics.

Dr. Popescu passed away June 16, 2022.

A 3D surface projection of live U-2 OS cell from a SLIM quantitative phase image is shown.

Research

Quantitative Microscopy/Drug Discovery: Adding on deep-tissue, subcellular, quantitative phase imaging

Dr. Gabriel Popescu, Ph.D.

May 2, 2018

Label-free, quantitative 3D tomography can now image thick, strongly scattering tissues with nanometer resolution and remarkable contrast.

FIGURE 1. A quantitative phase image of a prostate biopsy is stitched together from 100 (10 × 10) smaller field-of-view images. The quantitative data is indicated in different colors with red being a long optical path length and blue being a short optical path length. The color bar indicates phase shift in radians. The data show that the basal cell layer is clearly visible in the high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (HGPIN) cores.

Optics

PHOTONICS APPLIED: BIOPHOTONICS: Gradient field microscopy allows label-free disease diagnosis

Dr. Gabriel Popescu, Ph.D.

Aug. 1, 2012

Intrinsic contrast methods that rely on the passage of light through a transparent sample promise to change clinical pathology as we know it. Without requiring labels such as ...