Medical Engineering Distinguished Seminar Series, Professor Hui Cao

Lasers underpin many of today's biomedical imaging technologies, yet their intrinsic high coherence fundamentally limits image quality by introducing artifacts such as speckle. In this talk, I will describe a new paradigm for controlling laser coherence as an active degree of freedom in microscopy. We designed and built lasers with engineered spatial coherence to enable speckle-free, full-field imaging, and developed a fast, efficient strategy for dynamically switching coherence to support multimodality imaging within a single optical platform. Beyond suppressing artifacts, we showed that the statistical properties of speckled illumination can be tailored to enhance spatial resolution, improve axial sectioning, and boost image quality in both linear and nonlinear fluorescence imaging. Together, these advances position coherence-engineered lasers as versatile, programmable light sources for next-generation biomedical microscopy.

Biography: Hui Cao is the John C. Malone Professor of Applied Physics, a Professor of Physics and of Electrical Engineering at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1997. Her technical interests and activities are in the areas of complex lasers, mesoscopic optics, complex photonic materials and devices, nanophotonics, and biophotonics. She authored or co-authored one monograph, eleven book-chapters, twelve review articles and 291 journal papers. Cao is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Website link: https://www.eng.yale.edu/caolab/