Wolfgang Drexler

Wolfgang Drexler is the Director of the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Medical University Vienna (Austria). He earned his PhD in 1995 at the University of Vienna, where he continued as an Assistant Professor until 2000. From 2000 to 2006, he was Associate Professor of Medical Physics at the Center for Biomedical Engineering and Physics at the Medical University of Vienna. In 2001, he received the prestigious Austrian START Award from the Austrian Science Fund. In 2002 he became Director of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Laser Development and their Application in Medicine. In 2006, he moved to Great Britain, where he was appointed Full Professor of Biomedical Imaging at Cardiff University in Wales.
As a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology working with with Prof. James G. Fujimoto, he devised and built the first ultrahigh-resolution optical coherence tomography unit. He produced the highest resolution images ever obtained up to that time (1 μm axially), in addition to demonstrating spectroscopy, Doppler imaging, and oximetry with this device. He published this work as the first author of a landmark paper in Nature Medicine in 2001.