FIP Seminar: Fun and games with microscopes

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Wed, 03/01/2017 - 12:00 to 13:00

Dr. Jerome Mertz

Presenter

Dr. Jerome Mertz - Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University

Optical microscopes have become indispensable tools in biomedical laboratories.  However, conventional microscopes often have difficulty imaging deep in scattering media, or over large ranges of sample brightness, or over extended volumes at high speed. I will describe various techniques to mitigate these difficulties, using simple add-ons to commercial microscopes. Specifically, I will describe a phase contrast technique that works in arbitrarily thick tissue that can be used as a wavefront sensor for adaptive optics. I will also describe a digital feedback approach to increase the dynamic range of scanning microscopes by several orders of magnitude, with no loss of information or degradation in speed. Finally, I will present a simple, light efficient technique to achieve pseudo-volumetric imaging using a fast MEMS deformable mirror. These techniques can be applied to microscopes and, in some cases, to high-resolution endoscopes.  

Jerome Mertz received an AB in physics from Princeton University in 1984, and a PhD in quantum optics from UC Santa Barbara and the University of Paris VI in 1991. Following postdoctoral studies at the University of Konstanz and at Cornell University, he became a CNRS research director at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle in Paris. He is currently a professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. His interests are in the development and applications of novel optical microscopy techniques for biological imaging. He is also author of a textbook entitled Introduction to Optical Microscopy.