WVU professor awarded $330K NSF grant to develop laser diagnostics tool
November 3, 2009--Feruz Ganikhanov, assistant professor in the Department of Physics at West Virginia University (Morgantown, WV), plans to advance the medical industry with an alternative diagnostics tool to track biological cell processes that could lead to earlier detection of disease (see also "Colorado State University professors use optics to advance lab-on-a-chip technology" and "Low-cost DLS platform enables rapid, sensitive cancer detection" for other disease-detection methods).
He received a National Science Foundation award valued at nearly $330,000 to explore a new approach to building laser-based instruments that have micro-imaging abilities to view and scan small, complex cell compartments without disturbing biological structures.
The three-year NSF grant, titled "EPDT: Integrated nonlinear optical system for sensing and imaging based on all-fiber, non-mode-locked ultrafast laser sources," investigates a new conceptual approach to a nonlinear microscopy system. He will design a portable, compact device that uses a coherent vibrational spectroscopy technique for high detection sensitivity to identify molecular groups or subgroups within complex chemical and biological media.
Graduate and undergraduate students majoring in science and engineering fields and interested in interdisciplinary research will have the opportunity to work alongside Ganikhanov. He also plans to use the results of his research to develop curriculum for new summer courses.
Ganikhanov earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics from M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1985 and 1987, respectively. He received a doctoral degree in laser physics from the R.V. Khokhlov Nonlinear Optics Institute at M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1991. He has published 37 articles, contributed to a book chapter and holds two U.S. patents.
Prior to joining WVU faculty in 2006, he was a research scientist in Harvard University's Department of Chemistry, and Wellman Laboratories for Photomedicine researching the area of nonlinear optical imaging with applications to biological media. He joined Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies working in the area of digital lasers for high bit rate communication systems, was a senior laser physicist for Inrad, and spent his postdoctoral years in the Quantum Electronics Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique in France and in the ultrafast optics lab at Cornell University.
For more information, go to www.wvu.edu.
--Posted by Gail Overton, [email protected]; www.laserfocusworld.com.