AIMRC Seminar: Optical Toolkit for In Vivo and Ex Vivo Interrogation of Cerebral Microvasculature

Courtesy UC-Irvine

Bernard Choi

The Arkansas Integrative Metabolic Research Center will host a seminar at noon Monday, May 9, in White Engineering Hall 209 featuring Bernard Choi, a professor of biomedical engineering and surgery from the University of California, Irvine. During his talk, Choi will discuss how recent developments in photonic technologies, optical molecular probes and transgenic animal models have led to remarkable advances in the visualization of biological structures and processes. 

He will discuss ongoing efforts to image and characterize rodent cerebrovascular structure and function, with two primary applications: cardiac arrest and resuscitation, and Alzheimer's disease and related disorders. An emphasis will be placed on the constant push-pull between scientific questions of interest and the development and application of optical technologies and methodologies to address these questions. Specifically, the following optical tools will be discussed: laser speckle imaging, spatial frequency domain imaging and optical clearing.

Choi is also an associate director of the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic; an affiliated faculty member of the Edwards Lifesciences Foundation Cardiovascular Innovation Research Center and the Mathematical, Computational, and Systems Biology graduate program; and visiting scientist at CHOC Children's Hospital.

He received his B.S. in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. After completing an Arnold and Mabel Beckman Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine, he joined the faculty there as an assistant professor. He currently serves as the associate chair of academic affairs in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and he has won several teaching awards at the University of California, Irvine. 

He has held several leadership roles in international optics societies, including the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery (ASLMS), Optical Society of America (OSA) and SPIE, and he is a Fellow of SPIE. He has published more than 120 peer-reviewed papers and four book chapters. He currently is the principal investigator of the Microvascular Therapeutics and Imaging (MTI) laboratory in Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic and is funded by research awards from the United States Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health and industry contracts.

For those who prefer virtual attendance, the presentation will also be available via Zoom.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact Kimberley Fuller at fullerk@uark.edu.

This event is supported by the NIGMS of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P20GM139768. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.