She worked on a novel functional imaging system called OCT vibrography for assessing corneal biomechanical properties. In 2015, she received VENI grant and came back to the Netherlands as a post-doctoral researcher at the Academic Medical Center (AMC). In 2016, she received Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship. She is a tenured associate professor at the VU University Amsterdam, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Biophotonics and Medical Imaging Group.
Research description:
In our group, we develop integrated photonic circuits for optical and biomedical applications. We recently developed a new optical waveguide technology, which is low-loss, easy to fabricate, and has a small footprint. This is an enabling technology that we are applying to several different application areas as summarized below.
Optical biosensing is the most actively explored area in our group. Together with our medical and industrial collaborators, we are developing an inexpensive, disposable POC sensor to detect tumor biomarkers in the bloodstream in an NWO-funded project called COMB-O. In addition to photonic chip-based solutions, we also investigate novel fiber-optic-based sensing schemes. Recently, we demonstrated record-high sensitivity using a tapered tip fiber sensor combined with a simple image processing scheme.
Optical imaging is another field of research where we apply our waveguide technology. We developed novel components such as spectrometers and couplers for optical coherence tomography imaging and demonstrated the largest bandwidth achieved so far. We currently started developing wide-field chip-based optical imaging schemes for fluorescence imaging.
Cell/tissue mechanics is another research line of our group, which is not related to the photonic integrated circuit research of our group. We so far developed several novel concepts to measure the mechanical properties of cells/tissues including a confocal microscopy-assisted indentation system, optical interferometry-based micropipette aspiration, and acoustic resonance spectroscopy with an optical read-out scheme.
We are constantly improving our waveguide technology to expand our application field toward neuromorphic computation as well as neuroscience to provide unique tools.
