Vasilis Ntziachristos is a Full Professor C4/W3 of Medicine and Electrical Engineering and holds the Chair of Biological Imaging at the Technical University of Munich. He is also the Director of the Institute of Biological and Medical Imaging at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and Director of Bioengineering at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus. He is a founding member and board member of the translational oncology center Transla TUM and has led developments leading to the foundation of the Munich School of Bioengineering, where he currently serves as the Speaker of the Study Program.

Ntziachristos studied electrical engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, magnetic resonance as a Research Fellow at the Panum NMR Core Facility of the University of Copenhagen and at the Department of Radiology at Penn Medicine. He matriculated at the graduate program of the bioengineering department of the University of Pennsylvania where he completed a master's degree and a Ph.D. in bioengineering. His doctoral work, entitled "Concurrent magnetic resonance imaging and diffuse optical tomography to probe breast cancer", was carried out under the supervision of Britton Chance, Arjun Yodh and Mitchell Schnall.Following graduation Ntziachristos joined the faculty ranks of Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, initially as an instructor (2000) and then as an Assistant Professor (2002) and Director of the Laboratory of Bio-optics and Molecular Imaging. In 2007, he was recruited to Munich into a joint call from the Technical University of Munich and Helmholtz Zentrum München.

In 2013, he founded the open-access research journal Photoacoustics, which is the only peer-reviewed journal dedicated entirely to photoacoustic (optoacoustic) research. He currently serves as an editor of Chief of the journal. The journal is served by a Board of highly prominent researchers in the field.

For his work he has been awarded several prestigious awards, including the 2013 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation, considered to be the top scientific distinction in Germany and the 2015 Gold Medal of the World Molecular Imaging Society. For more information on his awards see the section on Prizes and Awards. His work often appears in the press. The 2018 anniversary report of the Technical University of Munich features a chapter on Vasilis Ntziachristos, naming him as one of three examples of professors that shape the future of the Technical University of Munich.

Interests

Ntziachristos is a globally recognized pioneer and entrepreneur in biomedical imaging. One of his focus areas is developing technology for fluorescence-guided surgical procedures for improving the accuracy of tumor removal. He and his collaborators published the first translational study in which a targeted fluorescent agent was systemically injected to distinguish tumor cells from healthy tissue during surgery. This approach is now being validated in several clinical trials . In 2012 Ntziachristos was a founding member of SurgVision, a company that has since commercialized technology from this research. SurgVision was recently acquired by Bracco Imaging S.p.A.

Recently, Ntziachristos and colleagues have demonstrated early detection of esophageal cancer, significantly improving detection over white light endoscopy. Successful application of this performance may mean life-saving curative procedures for tens of thousands of individuals each year and healthcare savings of several billion EUR per year.

Another focus of Ntziachristos' research is developing optoacoustic techniques for breaking thought the penetration barriers of conventional optical imaging methods. His group develops hardware, image reconstruction, spectral unmixing and information processing techniques as well as applications in biology and medicine. Among many other inventions, he is the inventor of multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) and raster scan optoacoustic mesoscopy (RSOM), which are non-invasive imaging methods that simultaneously measure different parameters of tissue physiology and pathology non-invasively, allowing new ways to diagnose disease and monitor treatment. MSOT and RSOM are now used in a range of preclinical and clinical studies, including advancing characterization of psoriasis, breast tumors, metastatic melanoma and inflammation in Crohn's disease.MSOT has also been used to visualize metabolism within brown fat, suggesting it may be effective for analyzing muscle energetics and lipid metabolism in a much simpler and more accessible way than with other techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging. Ntziachristos is a founder of iThera Medical GmbH, which currently commercializes optoacoustic technology and has placed systems around the world.

Awards/Prizes/Distinctions

• 2004: Named one of the 100 "top inventors" by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technology Review
• 2008: ERC Advanced Investigator Award of the European Research Council
• 2010: GO-Bio-Award of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany)
• 2011: Erwin Schrödinger Prize
• 2013: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize
• 2014: German Innovation Prize
• 2015: Gold Medal of the World Molecular Imaging Society
• 2015: ERC Advanced Investigator Award of the European Research Council
• 2019: Chaire d'excellence internationale Blaise Pascal awarded by the Région Île-de-France
• 2019: IEEE Elected Fellow

Austin Nevin is the Head of the Department of Conservation, at the Courtauld Institute of Art that unites Easel Painting and Wall Painting Conservation with transdisciplinary research on preventive conservation, technical art history, conservation science and conservation practice. His research focuses on the conservation and analysis of paintings, ancient and modern art on walls, easels and on paper and ranges from Chinese wall paintings to the analysis of Egyptian Polychromy and the analysis of red pigments from Leonardo´s The Last Supper. Trained as a conservator and conservation scientist he has worked as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Gothenburg and taught at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. Between 2011-2019 he was a Researcher at the Istituto di Fotonica e Nanotecnologie (IFN) in Milan, part of the Italian National Research Council. He completed post doctoral research at the Department of Physics at the Politecnico di Milano on applications of time resolved fluorescence spectroscopy to cultural heritage. Between 2004-2007 he was a Marie Curie Early Stage Research Fellow at the Foundation for Research and Technology (IESL-FORTH). Following a degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford (2001), he obtained an MA in the Conservation of Wall Painting (2004) and a PhD at The Courtauld (2008). He is a Vice President and Fellow of the International Institute for the Conservation of Artistic and Historic and is an Editor of Studies in Conservation and of the Springer Series Cultural

Education

• 2004-10-01 to 2008-07-21 | PhD (Conservation ), Courtauld Institute of Art: London, London, GB
• 2001-10-01 to 2004-07-30 | MA in the Conservation of Paintings (Wall Paintings) (Conservation of Wall Paintings) Education, Courtauld Institute of Art: London, London, GB
• 1997-10-01 to 2001-10-21 | MChem (Lady Margaret Hall), University of Oxford: Oxford, Oxfordshire, GB

Career

• 2020-09-01 to present | Head of Department (Department of Conservation) Employment, Courtauld Institute of Art: London, GB
• 2019 to 2020-08-30 | Senior lecturer, University of Gothenburg: Gothenburg, SE
• 2011-12-01 to 2019-02-01 | Researcher, Istituto di Fotonica e Nanotecnologie Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche: Milano, Lombardia, IT

Costas P. Grigoropoulos received his Diploma Degrees in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (1978), and in Mechanical Engineering (1980) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He holds a M.Sc. degree (1983), and a Ph.D. (1986), both in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University. He joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 1990, after serving as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington from 1986-1990. He was promoted to Associate Professor in July 1993 and to Professor in Mechanical Engineering in July 1997. He has conducted research at the Xerox Mechanical Engineering Sciences Laboratory, the IBM Almaden Research Center and the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, FORTH, Greece. He is Faculty Staff Scientist with the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Interests: 
Vasilis has research activities and interests in novel photonic systems and lasers in the visible and Terahertz spectrum. His interests are on THz spectroscopy, integrated microresonators and semiconductor quantum well lasers. His research has applications to diverse areas such as Quantum Science, materials science and medical applications.

Education

• BA in Physics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
• MSc and Ph.D. in Laser science and technologies from University of Southampton.

Career

• Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (2003 -2005)
• Marie Curie researcher in University of Cambridge
• University of Southampton - appointed lecturer (2007)
• University of Southampton - Associate Professor (2012)
• University of Montpelier - visiting research fellow (2016)
• University of Southampton - Professor (2022)
• University of Crete- Associate Professor (2023)

Liverios Lymperakis is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Physics, University of Crete, and an Associated Researcher of IESL-FORTH. He studied Physics (Bachelor's degree) and Physics of Materials (Master's degree) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He contacted his doctoral work at the Fritz-Haber-Institute of the Max-Planck-Society in Berlin and received his Ph.D. from the University of Paderbon in 2005 with summa cum laude.

He worked as a group and project leader at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung in Düsseldorf from 2005 to 2011 and from 2012-2021. His field of expertise is in Computational Materials with a strong focus on first-principles calculations and ab-initio-based multiscale calculations. His research addresses topics in the fields of science and technology of materials, such as properties and epitaxial growth of compound semiconductors, novel nano- and hetero-structures for optoelectronic and powerelectronic applications, and properties of bio-inspired and structural materials at the nanoscale.

Education

• 1997 First Degree in Physics, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki (Greece)
• 2000 MSc in Physics of Materials, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki (Greece)
• 2005 PhD in Physics, Universität Paderborn, Paderborn (Germany)

Career

• Since 2022, Associate Proffesor, Department of Physics, University of Crete
• 2012-2022, Head of the project group Growth Modelling, Computational Materials Design Department Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH, Düsseldorf (Germany)
• 2012, Senior Researcher, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki (Greece)
• 2005-2011, Head of the Microstructure group, Computational Materials Design Department Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung GmbH, Düsseldorf (Germany)
• 2000-2005,Research fellow Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Geselschaft, Berlin (Germany)