Public lecture by Kishan Dholakia

16 November 2016

Slides

light

Lights, Camera, Action: optics for life

A public lecture by Kishan Dholakia, Professor of Physics, University of St Andrews

Light is incredible. It has formed the basis of so many advances in the world around us, including revolutionising the way we communicate and interact. Importantly we have seen an mergence of the use of light in biomedical studies and healthcare as it offer unprecedented advantages for the global challenges we face in this area. In this talk, Professor Dholakia will convey some of the exciting ways light can help us understand and explore the biological and medical  world and beyond. He will describe how it can be used for studying diseases, neuroscience, early detection of cancer and infection and also spot a fake whisky!

Kishan Dholakia is Professor of Physics at the University of St Andrews Scotland, an honorary adjunct Professor at the centre for Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona,and visiting Professor at Chiba University, Japan. He heads the Optical Manipulation Group who work on a wide range of topics based on light. This includes advanced imaging for neuroscience and cancer diagnosis, beam shaping and optical manipulation. His work has led to a citation in the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s fastest man-made rotation and he’s even developed an optical method for analysis of  whisky! He is passionate about science outreach and has won several awards in this area. He was elected to the position of Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2007 and is fellow of the Optical Society (OSA) and SPIE. He won the European Optics Prize in 2003 and in 2008 he received a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award. He is this year’s winner of the R.W. Wood Prize of the Optical Society.

Professor Dholakia is a 2016 Institute of Advanced Studies Distinguished Visiting Fellow.

This lecture is part of the 2016 LightTALKS Series, where scientists, engineers and artists talk about optics and photonics, and how light-based technologies promote sustainable development and provide solutions to worldwide challenges in energy, education, agriculture, communications and health. The series is co-sponsored by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies, the Imaging and Informatics Group at the Lions Eye Institute, The Optical Society, its UWA chapter, and SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.