Associate Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Warren Zipfel holds a BS in biochemistry (1987) and a PhD in biophysics (1993), both from Cornell.
Funded by an NIH training grant in biological physics (biophysics)—which was the start of Cornell’s current graduate field of biophysics—his thesis involved work to understand the photophysics of photosynthesis using time-resolved measurements of fluorescence and computer modeling.
Before joining the BME faculty, Zipfel worked (since 1993) in Cornell’s Department of Applied and Engineering Physics with Watt Webb, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor in Engineering, as a post doc, research associate, and most recently a senior research associate. He serves as the associate director (Webb is the director) of the Developmental Resource for Biophysical Imaging and Optoelectronics (DRBIO), a research resource funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. DRBIO’s focus is on the creation of quantitative optical instrumentation for biophysical and biomedical research, particularly development of new forms of microscopy and optical bioanalytical techniques.
Zipfel is working to optimize the instrumentation for multiphoton microcsopy, a form of laser scanning microcopy co-invented by Webb at DRBIO about 15 years ago (in collaboration with Winfied Denk at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Biomedical Optics) and now used in biological research and medical imaging. The technique produces high-resolution, three-dimensional images of tissues with minimal damage to living cells. It can be conducted in still-living tissue inside or outside of the body in order to depict details of cells and cellular processes across the third and fourth dimensions.
Zipfel also is evaluating more direct clinical roles for multiphoton microcsopy technology. He is the principal investigator on several National Cancer Institute–funded projects using novel imaging techniques for early cancer detection and studies in cancer biology.
