BME7900 Seminar - Jeffrey Moses, PhD

Description

We welcome our next speaker, Dr. Jeffrey Moses, who is an Assistant Professor at Applied and Engineering Physics here at Cornell. Designing Light to Track Ultrafast Phenomena (and its Relevance to Biomedical Engineering) Abstract: The femtosecond timescale has become relevant to health in two ways. The first is through the use of broadband and/or powerful pulses of laser light as tools for surgery, for coherence tomography, or for methods in imaging and spectroscopy enabled by the induction of nonlinear optical material responses. The second is through the role of molecules that absorb light in biological systems. The rhodopsins, for example, enable human vision and are utilized as switches for the field of optogenetics. DNA has a mechanism to dissipate energy absorbed from UV radiation rapidly, thus avoiding damage that might otherwise cause mutations. These systems and others respond significantly to the absorption of light in a matter of femtoseconds. My group seeks to understand ultrafast phenomena in materials through the use of optical pumps and probes. To further our investigations, we look for new concepts for manipulating light in order to create better tools. Efficiently changing the color of femtosecond laser pulses is a major goal of this effort, as is creating synchronized light pulses across the UV, visible, and infrared spectrum. I will summarize some of our ongoing efforts in this area, as well as their possible relevance to the field of biomedical engineering. Bio: Jeff Moses joined the faculty in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University in 2014. Before that, he worked at MIT as a research scientist and principal investigator of federally sponsored research programs in ultrafast nonlinear optics, attosecond sources and physics, and molecular and chemical physics. Moses received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 2007, and his B.Sc. from Yale in 2001, with both degrees in applied physics. He is currently leading programs funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Office of Naval Research.