Vasan Venugopalan, ScD (vvenugop@uci.edu)
Dr. Venugopalan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering with joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, and the Beckman Laser Institute. He came to UCI in 1996 and in 1998 became an Investigator in the Laser Microbeam and Medical Program (LAMMP) National Biomedical Technology Resource (P41-EB015890). In 2008 with Dr. Jerry Spanier, he established the Virtual Photonics Technology Core within LAMMP focused on the development of computational methods to model light propagation and transport within biological systems and support the development and dissemination of a suite of open source software tools to the community. These tools can be accessed from the Virtual Photonics Website. He leads an active research program developing Biophotonics modeling and computational tools and pulsed laser microbeam technologies.
Bernard Choi, PhD (choib@uci.edu)
Dr. Choi is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and serves as the Associate Director of the Beckman Laser Institute at UC Irvine. Dr. Choi came to UCI in 2001 and in 2005 became an Investigator in the Laser Microbeam and Medical Program (LAMMP National Biomedical Technology Resource (P41-EB015890). Within LAMMP he served as Co-Project Leader of the Diffuse Optics Technology core. Prof. Choi has an active research group aimed at the development and translation of methods and technologies for multiscale optical interrogation of the structure and function of the microvasculature. His research has involved frequent use of modeling and computation tools to inform the design of Biophotonics technologies and to understand the origins of and perturbations to sources of optical contrast, with a recent focus on speckle contrast.