2015 MCASTA Annual Symposium - Keynote & Award

Dr. Yu-li Wang, the R. Mehrabian Professor and Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, holds a B.S. in Physics from National Taiwan University and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University. Prior to moving to Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, he was a Professor of Physiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

The rich academic training and work experiences of Dr. Yu-li Wang have encompassed colleges of basic science, medicine, and engineering, as well as medical centers and research institutes. His research has focused on aspects of cellular mechanical activities that serve as the foundation of cell and tissue engineering. Major contributions include the development of live cell imaging using fluorescently tagged proteins (1970's; Landmark Paper in Cell Biology), the elucidation of frontal extension mechanism for cell migration (1980's), the development of elastic polyacrylamide substrates for cellular mechanical studies including traction force microscopy (1990's), the demonstration of cellular sensitivities to materials rigidity (1990's), and the discovery of preferential cellular migration toward rigid materials (2000's). His studies have been described in textbooks and have provided some of the very fundamental principles for the fields of cell mechanics and tissue engineering.

Prof. Wang has published over 120 papers and edited three books on Cell Mechanics and on Fluorescence Microscopy of Living Cells. Three of his papers have received over 1000 citations and three other papers received over 500 citations. One of his papers was collected in the book "Landmark Papers in Cell Biology". He currently serves as an Associate Editor for Molecular Biology of the Cell, and for Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering. He has also served as a regular member of two NIH study sections and of the National Advisory General Medical Sciences Council of the National Institutes of Health. He has co-organized international conferences on cell division and on live cell imaging. He is a recipient of an NIH/NIGMS MERIT award and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Dr. Lihong Wang earned his Ph.D. degree at Rice University, Houston, Texas under the tutelage of Robert Curl, Richard Smalley, and Frank Tittel. He currently holds the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professorship of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. His book entitled "Biomedical Optics: Principles and Imaging," one of the first textbooks in the field, won the 2010 Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award. He also edited the first book on photoacoustic tomography and coauthored a book on polarization. He has published 425 peer-reviewed articles in journals including Nature (Cover story), Science, PNAS, and PRL and delivered 420 keynote, plenary, or invited talks. His Google Scholar h-index and citations have reached 97 and 36,000, respectively.

Dr. Wang's laboratory was the first to report functional photoacoustic tomography, 3D photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), photoacoustic endoscopy, photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, the photoacoustic Doppler effect, the universal photoacoustic reconstruction algorithm, microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography, ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing, nonlinear photoacoustic wavefront shaping (PAWS), compressed ultrafast photography (100 billion frames/sec.), sonoluminescence tomography, Mueller-matrix optical coherence tomography, optical coherence computed tomography, and oblique-incidence reflectometry. In particular, PAM broke through the long-standing diffusion limit on the penetration of optical microscopy and reached super-depths for noninvasive biochemical, functional, and molecular imaging in living tissue at high resolution. He has received 37 research grants as the principal investigator with a cumulative budget of over $47M. He is a Fellow of the AIMBE, Electromagnetics Academy, IEEE, OSA, and SPIE. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics. He chairs the annual conference on Photons plus Ultrasound, and chaired the Gordon Conference on Lasers in Medicine and Biology and the OSA Topical Meeting on Biomedical Optics. He was a chartered member of an NIH Study Section.

Dr. Wang serves as the founding chairs of the scientific advisory boards of two companies, which have commercialized photoacoustics. He received NIH's FIRST, NSF's CAREER, NIH Director's Pioneer, and NIH Director's Transformative Research awards. He also received the OSA C.E.K. Mees Medal, IEEE Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Biomedical Engineering Award, and SPIE Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award for "seminal contributions to photoacoustic tomography and Monte Carlo modeling of photon transport in biological tissues." An honorary doctorate was conferred on him by Lund University, Sweden。

Dr. Tseng is interested in translating advanced MRI imaging techniques to clinical applications.Currently, Dr. Tseng's team has constructed a brain template of diffusion spectrum data and an atlas of white matter pathways. Based on these achievements, Dr. Tseng's team developed an automatic tract-based analysis of the white matter integrity over the whole brain. The analysis method has been applied to patients with mental disorders such as schizophrenia, autism, ADHD and dementia, to discover biomarkers for early diagnosis and treatment prognosis.

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