The Biophotonics community at UC Davis, as organized around the central pillar of the NCIBT center, gathers for a monthly meeting where faculty, students and researchers meet and discuss work in progress and brainstorm new research directions in an informal, interactive setting. Each meeting is 2 hours (from 9am-11am) on the second Tuesday morning of each month in GBSF 2202. in duration and dedicated to specific biophotonics topics, described below. These Biophotonics meetings encourage the dissemination of progress in the field, provide a unique training opportunity for trainees to practice presenting their research and obtain feedback from their peers and mentors, and enable participants to gain a wider breadth of knowledge of the field in general. Once per quarter, students enrolled in the BTP 201 Topics In Biophotonics course, a required course for the Designated Emphasis (DE) in Biophotonics and Bioimaging, present flash talks on emerging topics in the field.
Date | Speaker, Title (Lab): "Talk Title" |
|---|---|
| April 14, 2026 | Nhan Nguyen, Grad Student (Alba Lab): "Fluorescence lifetime imaging for colorectal polyp characterization" Sayan Pauli, PhD (Alba Lab): "Label-Free Chemical Imaging: Capabilities of our new Stimulated Raman Scattering Setup" |
| March 10, 2026 | Leyla Kabuli, PhD Candidate (Professor Laura Waller Lab at UC Berkeley): "Designing lensless imaging systems to maximize information capture" Ben Mattison, PhD (Yang Lab): "High-throughput two-photon miniaturized microscope" |
| February 10, 2026 | Yifei Gu (Carney Lab): "A Vision Model Guided High-throughput Raman Microscope Enabling Blood Liquid Biopsy" Bec Mayer (Carney Lab): "Enhancing cancer detection accuracy in liquid biopsies using spatial Raman spectroscopy" |
| January 27, 2026 | Marco Wende, PhD (Doctorate Researcher, Institute of Applied Optics (IT) University of Stuttgart, Germany): "3D Printed micro-optics for fiber-endoscopy: ultra-compact, ultra-functional?" |
| January 13, 2026 | Alex Adams, PhD (Marcu Lab): "Real-time spatial augmentation of fluorescence lifetime imaging on preoperative MRI for brain tumor resection guidance" Xiangping Ouyang, M.Sc. (Marcu Lab): "Identification and Characterization of Biochemical and Morphological Markers of Atherosclerotic Plaque Progression Using Integrated FLIm-PSOCT Imaging" |
December 9, 2025 300 Aggie Square (LLL) Room #2103 - 2nd Floor | Dr. Andrew Birkeland: "FLIm in head and neck cancer surgery" Mohamed Abul Hassan, PhD (Marcu Lab): "EdgeWise: Real-time margin mapping in head-and-neck cancer with label-free fluorescence-lifetime imaging" |
| November 4, 2025 | Yucheng Li (Xue Lab): "Compressive Fourier-domain intensity coupling for scattering correction (C-FOCUS)." Renzhi He (Xue Lab): "Recover Biological Structure from Sparse-View Diffraction Images with Neural Volumetric Prior." |
| October 14, 2025 | Jeremy Kim, MD, Interventional Pulmonology, Assistant Clinical Prof. of Medicine: "Robotic Assisted Bronchoscopy – We Are Living in the Future But Still Behind" Alex Adams, PhD (Marcu Lab): "Enhancing Neuronavigation with Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging" |
| May 13, 2025 | Mihaela Balu, Ph.D. (University of California, Irvine): "Multiphoton Microscopy Breakthroughs: Enhancing Non-Invasive Clinical Skin Imaging" Hosted by Professor Alba Alfonso Garcia, PhD, UC Davis |
| April 15, 2025 | Myeongsoo Kim (PhD Candidate in BME at Georgia Tech/Emory University): "Regulating interparticle plasmon coupling in noble metal nanostructures for enhanced photoacoustic imaging" Hosted by Professor Jinwhan Kim, UC Davis |
| March 11, 2025 | BPT 201 student flash talks (4 talks, 15-min each) |
| February 11, 2025 | Bec Mayer (Carney Lab): "Enhancing Cancer Detection Accuracy in Liquid Biopsies using Spatial Raman Spectroscopy" Yifei Gu (Carney Lab): "Automated Raman Spectroscopy and Self-Supervised ML: Advancing Head & Neck Cancer Diagnosis" |
| January 14, 2025 | Xiangnan Zhou, PhD (Marcu Lab): "Combined multispectral FLIm/polarization-sensitive OCT catheter system for detection of macrophage foam cells in human atherosclerotic lesions" Silvia Noble Anbunesan (Marcu Lab): "In vivo characterization of FLIm signatures on the diffuse glioma in the brain cortical surface" |
| December 10, 2024 | BPT 201 student flash talks (15-min each) |
| November 12, 2024 | Feng Tian (Yang Lab): "Physics-informed Integrated Miniscope for Neuronal Imaging" Zixiao Zhang (Yang Lab): "Multiplexed Miniature Two-Photon Microscopy for High-speed Neuronal Imaging in Freely Behaving Mice" |
| February 14, 2024 | Bec Mayer (Carney Lab): "Reduction to Clinical Practice of Raman Biofluid Measurements" Dr. Jinhwan Kim, UC Davis BME/Surgery: "In vivo Tracking of Nanoengineered Cells for Advanced Cancer Theranostics" |
| November 14, 2023 | Carolyn Davis (Sivasankar Lab): "Light-activated BioID – an optically activated proximity labeling system to study protein–protein interactions" Prof. Siobhan Brady, UC Davis Plant Biology and Genome Center: "Microbe-mediated Striga resistance: how to image lots of bugs fast?" |
| October 10, 2023 | Ben Mattison (Yang Lab): "High Speed Miniaturized Multiphoton Microscopy with Elliptical Beam Excitation" |
| June 6, 2023 | Kajetan Wysoczynski: “Applications of Optogenetics in Cardiology” Jackie Xie: “Raman Spectroscopy in Cardiovascular Imaging” |
| May 18, 2023 | Prof. Samuel Achilefu, Professor and Chair, Department of Biomedical Engineering · University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center: "Lighting the Path to Cancer Detection and Therapy" |
| April 11, 2023 | Shing-Jiuan Liu (Yang Lab): "Transabdominal fetal heart rate measurement through fiber based frequency-modulated continuous-wave near-infrared spectroscopy" Prof. Randy Carney, UC Davis, Biomedical Engineering: "Neural network enabled nanoplasmonic spectroscopy for label-free liquid biospy cancer detection" |
| February 14, 2023 | Alba Alfonso Garcia, Project Scientist (Marcu Lab): "Fluorescence lifetime imaging for assessing gastrointestinal inflammation and detecting cancer" Ravi Jonnal, UC Davis Department of Ophthalmology and Vision Science: “Optoretinography: fundamental principles and clinical translation” |
December 6, 2022 | Jessica Korte: "The Optics in Optogenetics" Rishad Joarder: "Approaches to denoising CW fNIRS signals" Alita D’Almeida and Gautama Bharadwaj: “Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) for Brain Imaging” |
| October 11, 2022 | Feng Tian: "Learnable lensless 3D camera" Xiangnan Zhou, Ph.D. (Marcu Lab): "Recent advancements of pulse sampling time-resolved fluorescence" |
| July 7, 2022 | Kelsey Hadfield: "Optical Molecular Imaging Principles & Mechanisms of Optical Contrast" David Zhu: "Optical Spectroscopy Instruments and Applications in Surgical Oncology" |
| May 10, 2022 | Yi Xue, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, UC Davis: “Three-dimensional bi-functional refractive index and fluorescence microscopy (BRIEF)” |
| April 12, 2022 | Christina Kim, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Neurology, UC Davis: “Engineering optogenetic circuits for detecting intracellular signaling” Shing-Jiuan Liu: “Fiber based frequency-modulated continuous-wave near-infrared spectroscopy for transabdominal fetal pulse oximetry” |
| November 2, 2021 | Robert Zawadzki, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Ophthalmology & Vision Science UC Davis: "Latest developments In in vivo retinal imaging at UC Davis" |
| July 8, 2021 | Yunyang Li: "Optical design and configurations in mobile phone-based sensors" Hannah O’Toole: "Mobile-phone based platforms for lab-on-a-chip for hematology applications" Arielle Yoo: "Mobile Phone-Based Microscopy, Sensing, and Diagnostics: AI Methods" Ben Mattison: "Optical Design Considerations for Mobile Phone-Based Microscopy" |
| May 11, 2021 | Mark Harrison, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Chapman University, Fowler School of Engineering: "Nonlinear Optics for Biophotonics" |
| April 13, 2021 | Robert Zawadzki, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Ophthalmology & Vision Science UC Davis: "Progress in development and application of multimodal optical imaging of the living mouse retina" Jun Zhu: "Noninvasive, in vivo rodent brain optical coherence microscopy using the longwavelength NIR window" |
| March 11, 2021 | Cai Li: "Optical imaging techniques for the optimization of bio-engineered vascular graft manufacturing" |