Lyuba Amitonova obtained her PhD from the Lomonosov Moscow State University (Russia) in 2013 working on neurophotonics – optical methods to study and control the brain. Soon after, she started as a postdoc at the University of Twente (Netherlands) focusing on advanced methods of wavefront engineering for imaging, endoscopy, and quantum communication. In 2017 she secured a prestigious VENI grant (NWO) and moved to Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she pioneered super-resolution fiber imaging by combining advanced computational methods with multimode fiber optics. In October 2019, she received WISE fellow and has been appointed as a group leader at the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography and an assistant professor at VU Amsterdam.
Research Description
We are developing new methods of optical microscopy, sensing and metrology. Following its four-century-old history, optical microscopy has become indispensable in many scientific disciplines from physics and engineering to chemical and biomedical research. Despite the tremendous progress, state-of-the-art methods are held back by seemingly fundamental physical restrictions: spatial and temporal resolutions and penetration depth. This hampers numerous application areas. For example, to understand how the brain controls thoughts, emotions, and consciousness, it is essential to study the spatiotemporal dynamics of neuronal activity deep into the living brain with a high subcellular resolution.
We develop new approaches for minimally-invasive deep-tissue nanoscopy. The exponential growth of computing power helps to revolutionize optical imaging by rethinking both the optical design and the post-processing. We focus on the joint design of the front-end optical tools (hardware) and signal post-processing algorithms (software) by exploiting advanced microscopy methods, wavefront engineering, unique fiber probes, compressive sensing, computational imaging, and machine learning frameworks. We push the boundaries of state-of-the-art microscopy and provide deep-tissue imaging beyond the diffraction and Nyquist limits in a very simple and compact optical setup.
Together with Prof. Ruud Toonen (Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research, VU Amsterdam), we aim to visualize subcellular brain structures, such as dendritic spines, and study neuropeptide transmission deep inside the intact brain. Together with Prof. Jeroen Hoozemans (Department of Pathology, Amsterdam Neuroscience) we image and study human brain with Alzheimer’s disease.
