BIOGRAPHY:

Martin Leahy is the Chair of Applied Physics at the University of Galway and a serial entrepreneur having been technical and/or managerial lead of several successful spin-out companies in biophotonics and energy. Since his return to academia he has provided leadership as founding Director of the National Biophotonics and Imaging Platform, founding its education board and founding and chairing the International Biophotonics and Imaging Graduate Summer School (BIGSS). He has presided over several large research projects involving several groups. His main research interest is in the advancement of existing technologies such as laser Doppler and laser speckle as well as the development of new modalities such as TiVi and cmOCT for 2D, 3D and 4D imaging of the microcirculation. His group has invented the heart rate app which is now in use by more than 300 million people as well as cmOCT to image the microcirculation, nanosensitive OCT to sense nanostructure and multiple reference OCT to achieve a 100-fold reduction in size and cost. More recently, his group have developed a label-free superresolution microscope and synthetic OCT. He has secured more than €14M in external R&D funding since 2007. Since 2010 he has delivered 60 international invited/keynote lectures and published more than 60 senior author journal articles and more than 500 patents cite his work. 

LECTURE: "Solving Biomedical Problems with Light"

Light-based instruments typically have advantages of cost, sensitivity, size, portability and resolution. Challenges include: limited imaging/sensing depth in human tissues, and toxicity of many molecular labels.  

We will attempt to outline the fundamentals of these challenges and provide some tools to overcome same. Examples will include the heart rate app, microcirculation imaging, nanosensitivity and label-free superresolution.