• Flash Pathology | Amsterdam | Adviseur | 2021-10-26 - present
• AMOLF | Amsterdam | Adviseur | 2021-12-06 - present

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I am a physicist working in the field of medical photonics and biophysics. I am interested in developing novel photonic methodologies and bringing them into the clinic to improve clinical healthcare. My interest stems from the fascination with femtosecond lasers, nonlinear optical interactions of tissue with light, and the unique biophysical processes we can visualize and study with that.

I received my PhD in Physics in 1997 from the Vrije Universiteit. Between 1997 and 2000 I worked at the University of Chicago in the Department of Chemistry and as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Ecole Polytechnique-ENSTA in Palaiseau, France. I then returned to Amsterdam on two personal fellowships (PULS and Vidi), in 2005 I was appointed on the Fenna Diemer Lindeboom chair, and in 2011 as full professor. Around 2011 I shifted my research focus from ultrafast spectroscopy of photosynthetic proteins and enzymes to nonlinear microscopy on tissue.

In my research group we have developed higher harmonics generation microscopy for Instant Pathology, a/o through a TTW funded project (in collaboration with the Amsterdam UMC pulmonology department, 2017-2022, and the Prinses Maxima Center for pediatric oncology) which is being followed up and extended within the EU project IMAGIO (2023-2028, with a/o RadboudUMC and Philips Research). Lung- and brain- tumor biopsies have been imaged with HHG and automated analysis software based on both classical and AI-based methods have been developed and are being improved, in collaboration with the spinoff company Flash Pathology BV. Other projects are aimed to study the relation between the 3D microstructure of skin and biomechanical properties (3), collagen-producing fibroblast cultures of healthy and diseased cell lines, and the study of cell dynamics in acute tissue slices.