Conor Evans: Smart bandage monitors and treats healing wounds

Conor L. Evans received his BS in Physical Chemistry from Brown University and PhD in Chemistry from Harvard University. He carried out his postdoctoral training research under the supervision of both Tayyaba Hasan and Johannes de Boer in the application of advanced microscopy to cancer research. He now serves as Assistant Professor at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine of Harvard Medical School at the Massachusetts General Hospital. His lab's research is focused on the development and clinical translation of optical microscopy and spectroscopy tools, with specific interests in ultrasensitive detection of molecular markers, label-free imaging of tissues, and the imaging and quantification of tissue oxygenation. Evans has led the use of coherent Raman imaging technologies in biomedicine, and was the first to apply this imaging toolkit for the real-time visualization of lipids in skin in vivo. He has developed a number of imaging devices and methods, including coherent Raman imaging, time-lapse optical coherence tomography, hyperspectral confocal microscopy, tissue-clearing methods, and "smart" sensing bandages. He currently holds 9 patents and patent applications and has more than 30 peer-reviewed publications.

A recipient of the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, his recent efforts in the synthesis of bright oxygen sensors has resulted in the creation of four new porphyrin molecules that are currently being translated for clinical use. He is a Royce Fellow of Brown University and has been honored with several awards, including the Goldwater Scholarship, NASA Space Grants, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Evans has taught Physical Chemistry Laboratory at Harvard University, is a planning group member of the Harvard Ludwig Center, and an affiliate faculty member of the Harvard Biophysics Program.