Plenary Speakers  

Lihong Wang earned his PhD 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 co-authored a book on polarization and edited the first book on photoacoustic tomography. Professor Wang has published 342 peer-reviewed journal articles and delivered 370 keynote, plenary, or invited talks. His Google Scholar h-index and citations have reached 81 and over 26,000, respectively.

His laboratory invented or discovered functional photoacoustic tomography, 3D photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), the photoacoustic Doppler effect, photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, focused scanning microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography, the universal photoacoustic or thermoacoustic reconstruction algorithm, frequency-swept ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing, 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 to the penetration of conventional optical microscopy and reached super-depths for noninvasive biochemical, functional, and molecular imaging in living tissue at high resolution. His Monte Carlo model of photon transport in scattering media is used worldwide.

He has received 34 research grants as the principal investigator with a cumulative budget of over $41M. Professor Wang is a Fellow of the AIMBE (American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering), OSA (Optical Society of America), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and SPIE (Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics. He chairs the annual conference on Photons plus Ultrasound, and chaired the 2010 Gordon Conference on Lasers in Medicine and Biology and the 2010 OSA Topical Meeting on Biomedical Optics. He is a chartered member on an NIH Study Section. Wang serves as the founding chairs of the scientific advisory boards for two companies commercializing his inventions. He received NIH’s FIRST, NSF’s CAREER, and NIH Director’s Pioneer awards.

He was awarded the OSA C.E.K. Mees Medal, IEEE Technical Achievement Award, and IEEE Biomedical Engineering Award for “seminal contributions to photoacoustic tomography and Monte Carlo modeling of photon transport in biological tissues and for leadership in the international biophotonics community.

Professor Min Gu is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Australian Institute of Physics, the Optical Society of America, the International Society for Optical Engineering and the Institute of Physics (UK).

He is a Laureate Fellow of the Australian Research Council. Previously, he was Special Advisor to the Vice-Chancellor (Staff Development), Dean of Science, a Deputy Dean of the Faculty and a member of the University Council, Academic Board and Board of Research at Swinburne.

He gained a PhD degree in optics from Chinese Academy of Sciences. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow first at the University of New South Wales, and later at the University of Sydney. He was awarded an Australian Research Fellowship of the Australian Research Council at the University of Sydney. He joined Victoria University of Technology in 1995, where he became Professor (Chair) of Optoelectronics and Director of Optical Technology Research Laboratory 1998.

At the beginning of 2000, he was invited for the appointment of Professor (Chair) of Optoelectronics and Director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics (research budget AUD$7M and 60 research staff and students in 2010) at Swinburne University of Technology. He is also the Director of the State-Government-funded Victoria-Suntech Advanced Solar Facility that he initiated and established in 2010. He was awarded the University Distinguished Professor in 2003. From 2003, he has been a Node Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (AUD$54M). Since 2005, he has been a node leader of the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Polymers. His discipline, Physical Science, has been rated to be 5 stars in the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) rankings (Australian Research Council, 2011).

Professor Gu is a pioneer and an internationally-leading authority on three-dimensional optical imaging science. He is a sole author of two standard reference books, Principles of Three-Dimensional Imaging in Confocal Microscopes (World Scientific, 1996) and Advanced Optical Imaging Theory (Springer-Verlag, 2000). He is also the first author of the book published by Cambridge University Press (Femtosecond Biophotonics: Core Techniques and Applications, 2010). He has over 800 publications (over 330 papers in internationally refereed journals including Nature and Nature Photonics) in photonic crystals and devices, nanophotonics/biophotonics, micro/nanofabrication, confocal and multiphoton microscopy, laser tweezers, optoelectronic imaging through tissue-like turbid media, laser trapping and neat-field microscopy, multi-dimensional optical data storage and photovoltaics. He is a member of the 14 Editorial Boards of top international journals. He has been a member of the Advisory/Steering/Organizing committees of many international conferences (more than 120). He was/is a plenary/invited/keynote speaker on many international conferences (more than 120). He was President (2002-2004) and is Vice President (2004-2012) of the International Society of Optics within Life Sciences. He is Vice President of the International Commission for Optics (2005-2011).

He received the University Research Excellence Award in 2002 and the Vice-Chancellor Research Awards in 2009. He was awarded the Chang Jiang Chair Professorship (Ministry for Education, China, 2007), the World Class University Professorship (Ministry for Education, Korea, 2009), the Thousand Talents Award (Ministry for Education, China, 2009), the Einstein Professorship (Chinese Academy of Science, 2010), and the Laureate Fellowship (Australian Research Council, 2010).

Professor Gu has conducted many pioneering projects in the area of bio/nanophotonics and his ground breaking research work has been featured more than 2000 times in media reports including Nature Photonics, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Materials, Nature Asia-Materials, Biophotonics International, Photonics Spectra, Laser Focus World, Economists, Australian Optical Society News, The Australian, The Age, The Herald Sun, Campus Review, Australasian Science and ABC TV and Radio. His inventions include five-dimensional high-density optical data storage, nanoplasmonic solar cells and nonlinear optical endoscopy. Consequently, six spin-off companies were established, 3DCD Technology Pty. Ltd. in 2001 (received the COMET Grant and Achievement Award from the AusIndustry in 2002), InFocus Enterprises Pty. Ltd. in 2003, InVision Medical Technologies Pty. Ltd. in 2003 (received the COMET Grant in 2005), Image Cytometrics Pty. Ltd. in 2008 (received the COMET grant in 2008), Biosurfaces Pty Ltd. in 2008 and RongXing SciTech Co in 2009. Four international leading companies, Samsung Electronics (Korea), Suntech Power Holdings (China), OptiScan Pty. Ltd. (Australia) and Genera Biosystems Pty. Ltd. (Australia), have established joint R&D projects with Professor Gu's Centre.

Tony graduated from the University of Oxford in 1976 and completed his DPhil in 1979. Following a period as an SRC Advanced Fellow and Research fellow at Brasenose College he became a Member of Technical Staff at Bell laboratories in the USA. He was appointed as a Tutorial Fellow in Engineering Science at Hertford in 1984.

Tony’s research lies in the broad area of applied optics with particular emphasis on the development of high-resolution optical microscopes and related systems. This work is necessarily both theoretical and experimental in nature with the aim of providing end users – often researchers in the biosciences -- with state-of-the-art imaging equipment.  Current research areas include confocal, multi-photon and widefield sectioning microscopes, with applications ranging from bio-imaging to materials characterisation.   His work, which is firmly based in science and applied in nature, has led to the formation of two companies, Oxford Optoelectronics Ltd. and Aurox Ltd, and resulted in eleven major awards.  The most recent, in 2012, are the Institute of Physics innovation Award and a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the innovation category.

Tony is also Thousand Talents Professor at the Harbin institute of Technology, President of the Royal Microscopical Society, General Editor of the Journal of Microscopy and Junior Warden of the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers. He is also an honorary fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society

Prof Xu Liu received his PhD from Universite d'Aix-Marseille III, France in 1990 and has worked in Zhejiang University since then. His main research fields are: optical thin films, optoelectronic functional thin film devices and application, 3D display techniques and precision detection. Prof Xu Liu has won the Second Grade National Scientific Progress award, the First Grade Scientific Progress Award of the Ministry of Education and Zhejiang Province, and the Chinese Young Scientist Award. He has been selected as the Super-expert of Zhejiang Province and Chang Jinag Scholar Professor in 2009.