Dr. Peng Xi is a Boya distinguished professor at College of Future Technology, Peking University, China. His research interest is on the development of optical super-resolution microscopy techniques. He has been awarded the National Distinguished Young Scholar. He is elected as the Fellow of IAAM in 2022. He is the Chief scientist of the Key Research and Development Plan of the Ministry of Science and Technology. He is on the editorial board of 5 SCI-indexed journals such as Light and Advanced Photonics. He has published over 100 scientific journal papers on peer-reviewed journals including Nature, Nature Methods, etc., and the published articles have been cited for more than 8,000 times. He has been granted three American patents and nineteen Chinese patents, and delivered many plenary talks on international conferences hosted by SPIE and OPTICA (OSA).

To further extend the capability of super-resolution in XYZλθT 6 dimensions, we developed polarized structured illumination microscopy (Polar-SIM), which achieves super-resolution imaging of dipoles by interpreting the dipoles in spatio-angular (XYZθ) hyperspace. Further, the multi-wavelength excitation enables study of the dynamic interactions of subcellular organelles. We demonstrate the application of Polar-SIM on a series of biological filamentous systems, such as cytoskeleton networks and λ-DNA, and report the dynamics of short actin sliding across a myosin-coated surface. With the modulation of the incident angle, we can generate TIRF- or HiLo- illumiation for Polar-SIM. Also, for thick specimen, the structured illumination can be used with lower frequency to generate grid confocal, enabling the optical sectioning capability. Polar-SIM also reveals the side-by-side organization of the actin ring structures in the membrane-associated periodic skeleton of hippocampal neurons, which was not discovered before. To boost the development of 3D-SIM, we also report Open-3DSIM, an open-source 3D-SIM reconstruction tool with rich features.

Dr Wang is currently a Professor of Bioengineering and Ophthalmology at the University of Washington, where he also holds the positions of George and Martina Kren Endowed Chair in Ophthalmology Research and WRF/David and Nancy Auth Endowed Innovator of Bioengineering. Among his most notable contributions is the invention of optical microangiography, an OCT technique (commonly known as OCTA) that enables 3D imaging of blood flow within microcirculatory tissue beds in vivo. Dr. Wang’s current research interests span biophotonics and imaging, with a focus on applications in ophthalmology, neuroscience, dermatology, and oncology. He has authored over 600 peer-reviewed journal articles, with an h-index of 93 (according to Google Scholar). He received UW Medicine Inventor of the Year in 2023, James G Fujimoto Award and SPIE Britton Chance Award. Dr. Wang is a Fellow of Optica, SPIE, and AIMBE, and was elected to the Washington State Academy of Sciences. Additionally, he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Biomedical Optics Express, an Optica Publishing Group journal, and is a member of the Editorial Board for the American Journal of Ophthalmology.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a new medical imaging modality in which the coherent interference of a wide spectrum light source is used to create a high resolution (micron-scale) subsurface image of tissue microstructure. Recently, we have supplemented the microstructural OCT images with additional contrast mechanisms such as blood flow imaging using static and motion contrast, which provide us the ability to perform label-free optical microangiography (OMAG) of microcirculatory tissue beds. The ability to visualize tissue blood flow at the microcirculation level is important in a variety of biomedical applications, some of which (along with the OCT basics and the enabling technologies) will be highlighted in this talk. Examples using OMAG to delineate the dynamic blood perfusion, down to capillary level resolution, within living tissue will be given, including cerebral blood flow in small animals, and retinal blood flow in humans.

The global incidence of melanoma continues to increase over the past decades. Approximately 80% death of skin cancer is due to melanoma. Melanoma has a high frequency of blood-borne metastases. Circulating melanoma cells, the prognosis marker for metastasis, are present in the circulation at the early stage. Thus, quantitative detection of rare circulating melanoma cells is essential for monitoring tumor metastasis and prognosis evaluation. Compared with in vitro assays, in vivo flow cytometry is able to identify circulating tumor cells without drawing blood. Here, we have built in vivo photoacoustic flow cytometry based on the high absorption coefficient and monitoring circulating melanoma cells. Circulating targets in the blood flow are illuminated by high-pulsed repetition rate laser, followed by absorption of photons and generation of ultrasound to surroundings. Then the generated ultrasound could be received by ultrasound transducer. In the near-infrared window, melanin has higher absorption coefficient, which has great difference from hemoglobin, lipids, collagen and water. We have built in vivo photoacoustic flow cytometry (PAFC) system to detect circulating melanoma cells in superficial vessels, which is useful for evaluating cancer stage and monitoring therapeutic effects.

Chengbo Liu is a Professor at Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his Bachelor degree from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2007 and his Ph.D degree from a joint program between Xi'an Jiaotong University and Duke University in 2012. His research interest focuses on multimodality optical and ultrasound imaging instrumentation and translation. His team has published more than 120 journal papers, including Science Advances, Nature Communications and PNAS, with a total citation of more than 6500. He serves as an associate editor of Biophotonics Discovery and an editorial board member of Photoacoustics journal. His research has been funded with more than 30 grants including 12 grants from NSFC and MOST of China.

Advances in brain imaging methodologies have revolutionized our ability to visualize brain activities, offering unprecedented opportunities for neuroscience. In this talk, I will introduce the brain imaging technologies we have developed to map brain activities with light and ultrasound. I will start with a cortex-wide photoacoustic and fluorescence hybrid microscope, which achieves simultaneous neurovascular imaging across a 6 mm×5 mm field of view with subcellular resolution. To record neurovascular dynamics in freely moving mice, we engineered a miniaturized head-mounted microscope weighing only 1.7 g while preserving high-spatiotemporal resolution. To capture rapid hemodynamics, we constructed an ultrafast photoacoustic microscope operating at 120 Hz frame rates with 3-μm resolution, enabling blood flow velocity imaging at the single red blood cell level in the brain. Furthermore, leveraging transparent piezoelectric materials and acoustic layers, we developed a hybrid ultrasound and optical brain imaging system based on transparent ultrasound linear arrays. This innovation bridges the gap between deep brain microvascular hemodynamic changes and neural activities captured by wide-field fluorescence. We successfully applied our technologies across diverse brain imaging experiments, demonstrating their capabilities to decode brain functions and elucidate mechanisms of brain diseases.

Dr Haoran Ren is an ARC DECRA Fellow and leads the Structured Nanophotonics Group at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University. His research in nanophotonics explores the full potential and multi-dimensional nature of light, focusing on controlled light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. He serves as an Associate Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS), Secretary (2025) of the Australian and New Zealand Optical Society, Chair (2024-2026) of the OPTICA Photonic Metamaterials Technical Group. He has received several prestigious awards, including the 2024 Faculty of Science Award for Excellence in Research at Monash University, 2024 SPIE Best Paper Award, 2024/25 ANFF-VIC Technology Fellow Ambassador, 2024 Perkins Collaboration Research Award, 2023 Candidate Award for Rising Stars of Light, 2023 Perkins Early Career Researcher Awards, 2022 Emerging Leaders (Journal of Optics), and 2022 Geoff Opat Early Career Researcher Prize by the Australian & New Zealand Optical Society.

Stereoscopic Optical Palpation (SOP) is a camera-based optical elastography technique that employs stereoscopic imaging with two cameras and a compliant silicone layer of known mechanical properties to visualize surface stress on tissue. While SOP has shown promise in benchtop systems and has been evaluated in a diagnostic feasibility study for breast tumor margin assessment during breast-conserving surgery, its current implementation is bulky and complex. The use of two digital cameras necessitates precise calibration to avoid misalignment, adding to the system’s complexity. In this work, we present a new imaging tool for breast cancer detection, metasurface-enabled stereoscopic optical palpation (MESOP), by combining binocular metalenses with a single digital CMOS sensor to measure and visualize tissue surface stress. We characterized the point spread function and field-of-view of the metalenses and performed stereoscopic optical palpation on silicone phantoms with embedded mechanical contrasts. Additionally, we demonstrated MESOP’s capability to distinguish malignant tumor from benign tissue in freshly excised human breast specimens. This compact, cost-effective system holds promise for routine clinical use in real-time breast cancer detection.

Kai Wang is a group leader at the laboratory of Optical Neuroimaging in the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2005 and 2007, respectively. Completing his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2011, he pursued postdoctoral training in Dr. Eric Betzig’s Lab at Janelia Research Campus, HHMI. In 2015, he transitioned to the Institute of Neuroscience, where his primary research focuses on developing new fluorescent imaging techniques for neuroscience studies.

The immense number of neurons in the brain, combined with their rapid dynamic interactions across intricate networks, presents formidable challenges in neuroscientific researches. To gain a deeper understanding of this complex system, it is essential to record neural activity across large populations and analyze the dynamic connections at higher resolutions. To tackle these challenges, we introduce two advancements in optical imaging techniques. The first is a light field imaging (LFM) technique capable of capturing volumetric dynamics within a single camera snapshot, enabling high-throughput functional neural imaging. In our second study, we developed multiplexed, line-scanning, structured illumination microscopy (MLS-SIM), to track morphological dynamics of neurons in awake and behaving animals. These new optical technologies can be valuable tools to advance the analysis and study of complex neural networks.

Liangcai Cao received his BS/MS and PhD degrees from Harbin Institute of Technology and Tsinghua University, in 1999/2001 and 2005, respectively. Then he became an assistant professor at the Department of Precision Instruments, Tsinghua University. He is now tenured professor and director of the Institute of Opto-electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University. He was a visiting scholar at UC Santa Cruz and MIT in 2009 and 2014, respectively. His research interests are holographic imaging and holographic display. He is a Fellow of the Optica and the SPIE.

Phase retrieval serves as a core technique in computational imaging, yet conventional idealized models often yield unsatisfactory reconstruction in practical applications. Critical image features, including edges, textures, and structural patterns, maintain remarkable stability across various image transformations and degradations. We developed Feature-Domain Phase Retrieval (FD-PR), an approach that formulates the wavefront reconstruction loss function based on these stable features rather than spatial pixels. The resolution and quality of the reconstruction are greatly improved in the experiments of coded ptychography, Fourier ptychography, in-line holography, and aberration-correction imaging. The framework can benefit a wide range of computational microscopy techniques, such as X-ray ptychography, diffraction tomography, and wavefront shaping.

Xing Sheng is a professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering and the IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Tsinghua University, China. He received his bachelor degree from Tsinghua University in 2007 and PhD degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2012 to 2015. His current interests are primarily in the exploration of implantable micro- and nano-scale optical and electronic devices for neural signal sensing and modulation. He has published papers in peer-reviewed journals like Nature Photonics, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, Science Advances, PNAS, etc. He is a senior member of IEEE, a life member of SPIE, and a fellow of Optica.

Bio-integrated high performance inorganic optoelectronic devices will provide new insights on interactions between light and bio-systems. Here we present unconventional strategies to design and fabricate microscale, thin-film optoelectronics devices including micro-LEDs and photodetectors that can be formed via epitaxial liftoff and transfer printing techniques. These microscale devices can be heterogeneously integrated on flexible and stretchable substrates and interact with biological systems for biomedical applications. In particular, we produce multifunctional neural probes that can be directly implanted into the deep brain of freely moving animals, modulating and detecting neural activities in vivo. These photonic implants interrogate the nervous systems, providing insights for fundamental neuroscience studies and promises for medical applications.