Principal Investigator

MugshotDr Chris Rowlands started his academic career in 2001 at Imperial College, but on the other side of campus, in the Chemistry department. After discovering that he couldn't sketch a hexagon well enough to be any good at synthetic chemistry, he decided to concentrate on physical chemistry, if only because it required remembering the names of fewer chemists. This proved a good career move, and he went on to study for a PhD in the physics and chemistry of chalcogenide glasses at Cambridge University, in the group of Prof. Stephen Elliott. It was there that he learned about glass synthesis, Raman microscopy, analytical chemistry techniques of all kinds, algorithm design, and several new swearwords for use when attempting to get the laser working again.

After leaving Cambridge in 2010, he spent a year at the University of Nottingham, studying the use of Raman microscopy in diagnosing cancer in the group of Dr Ioan Notingher, before receiving a three-year Wellcome Trust MIT Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the group of Prof. Peter So. There he discovered the delights (and curses) of multiphoton microscopy, fluorescence lifetime microscopy, super-resolution imaging, light-sheet microscopy and many more fluorescence microscopy techniques. Five years, several papers, two snowpocalypses and multiple swearwords later, his visa ran out, so he came back to the UK to continue his fellowship back in Cambridge, as a guest in the laboratory of Prof. Clemens Kaminski. While nominally developing new super-resolution techniques, a suspiciously high fraction of his time was actually spent drinking tea and trying to sneak naughty acronyms into serious scientific journals.

The tea and naughty acroyms were clearly a good career move, because in 2017 he was invited to join the Bioengineering Faculty at Imperial College as a lecturer. His current research is focussed on the development of optical instrumentation, particularly for use in biological applications. Nevertheless, the main focus of the lab is on interesting research, so if there's a good idea and the resources are available to do it, the group will have a go. Science is supposed to be fun after all.

Postdoctoral Researchers

  • Ke Guo

    Personal details

    Ke Guo Postdoctoral Research Associate

    Research

    Ke Guo works on the development of an oblique plane microscope (OPM) with primed conversion labelling and Raman spectroscopy functionalities integrated. Such an instrument can potentially be useful for studying cell lineage and embryo development.

  • Jon Gorecki

    Personal details

    Jon Gorecki Postdoctoral Research Associate

    Research

    Jon specialises in experimental optics and is currently developing a system for Fluorescence Diffuse Optical Tomography (FDOT) for in-situ monitoring of biological reactions.

  • Roman Ziniuk

    Personal details

    Roman Ziniuk Postdoctoral Research Associate

    Research

    Roman is developing Streaming Continuous Optical Nanosecond Events (SCONE) system, which will break new ground by prototyping a system that can record frames at high speed continuously, to image phenomena which occur over much longer timescales.

     

PhD Candidates

  • Isabell Whiteley

    Isabell

    Personal details

    Isabell Whiteley

    Research

    Isabell researches neurophotonic holography, specifically methods to project 3D light patterns into the brain. This can be used to image membrane potentials and control neurons at high speed.

  • Neil Wright

    Personal details

    Neil Wright

    Research

    Neil is researching the physical basis of memory, using a variety of methods including optical imaging and molecular biology.

  • Aline Buat

    Personal details

    Aline Buat

    Affiliations

    Aline is working on a novel instrumentation system performing optical detection of ultrasound, with the aim of producing an ultrasound image with higher resolution over conventional systems.

  • Lito Chatzidavari

    Lito Chatzidavari

    Personal details

    Lito Chatzidavari

    Research

    Lito is working on optimising the resolution and flexibility of conventional ultrasound by developing an optical ultrasound transmission system.

Masters Students

Undergraduates

Alumni

 
Name Role Details
Glenn Howe Postdoctoral Research Associate  
Elias Rabbat Masters Student  
Setthibhak Suthithanakom Masters Student  
Megan Allerton Undergraduate student  
Yacout Rtel Bennani Undergraduate student  
Callan Egan Undergraduate student  
Marta Masramon Muñoz Undergraduate student  
Craig Young Undergraduate student  
Abderrahim Boualam PhD candidate  
Muhsincan Sesen Postdoctoral Research Associate  
Debora Machado Andrade Schubert Postdoctoral Research Associate  
Benjamin Warmington Undergraduate student  
Alfonso Parra Garcia Undergraduate student  
Roxanne Sabbag Undergraduate student  
Ioana Filipas Undergraduate student  
Marta Llorden de Paz Masters Student  
Pavlos Dimitriou Masters Student  
Clara Tavernier Masters Student  
Costanza Di Veroli Undergraduate student  
Ze Lum Undergraduate student  
David Chen Undergraduate student  
Yann Zhong Undergraduate student  
Ife Chinweze Undergraduate student  
Luka Lagator Undergraduate student  
Peerapong Rithisith Undergraduate student  
Gabrielle Convert UROP student  
Weng Foo Undergraduate student  
Christos Argyros Masters Student  
Summary of the table's contents