Dr. Zhiguang Xu

At M.I.T. I developed several new optical instruments for characterizing polymer based microfluidic devices, also named as lab-on-a-chip technology. These instruments involved white-light interferometer, Moiré fringe technique, imaging processing, confocal microscope, and Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). At Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. With an accelerated promotion, I built a label-free light sheet microscope (LFLSF) to image the brain tissue at cellular resolution, which avoids the cumbersome fluorescent staining procedure and does not suffer from the photobleaching and phototoxicity which is common in fluorescent approaches. Now I am applying LFLSF to detect intrinsic activities of the neurons in unlabeled brain tissue, which has the promise to “watch” each action potential, the smallest unit of neural activity, from each neuron in a local circuit, without using fluorescence or other staining approach. This project, funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, will revolutionize the traditional approaches to visualize the neural behavior.

I have over 12 year research experiences in the area of optical engineering and published 17 peer-reviewed journal papers, with 13 1st authored (including 2 as co-author but with equal contribution as 1st author). I also first-authored 1 book chapter and given scientific presentations 9 times in international academic conferences. Invited by journals such as Optics Letters, Optics Express, etc., I have reviewed 60 submitted manuscripts on a regular basis. In 2012 I was elected as SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering) Senior Member (totally 122 newly elected worldwide).