Dr. Daniel X. Hammer

Daniel X. Hammer received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1991 and a MS and PhD from University of Texas (UT) at Austin in 1998 and 2001. He has over 25 years’ experience in the invention, design, development, and application of biomedical optics and instrumentation to a broad range of interdisciplinary research programs.

He was an Air Force officer and experimental researcher in the Air Force Research Laboratory at Brooks AFB, San Antonio TX from 1992 to 1996. There he studied nonlinear optical interactions with aqueous media and helped perform experiments that set the ANSI laser safety standard for the ultrashort pulse laser regime. In graduate school at UT under the direction of A.J. Welch, he studied the infrared pit organ of the pyrophilic beetle, Melanophila acuminata. He worked for Physical Sciences Inc. in Andover MA from 2001 to 2012, where he led the Biomedical Imaging Area in the development of line of clinical and research adaptive optics (AO) instruments. Clinical prototype AO devices developed under Dr. Hammer’s guidance are operational in 8 clinics and research laboratories across the U.S. and Canada. Dr. Hammer is currently the Deputy Director of the Division of Biomedical Physics in the Office of Science and Engineering Laboratories, Center of Devices and Radiological Health, FDA in Silver Spring MD. He leads several research teams in vision science and neurophotonics in the medical device regulatory science space. He is investigating the application of multimodal adaptive optics to glaucoma, macular degeneration, and other retinal disease. He is also examining the long-term response to cortical implants using OCT and two-photon microscopy.

Dr. Hammer is co-editor of "Advances in Optical Imaging for Clinical Medicine" and has 15 patents and disclosures, over 85 peer-reviewed publications, and over 150 other papers and publications. He is a member of AIMBE (fellow), ARVO, OSA, and SPIE (fellow).