In the past 10+ years, laser microscopy has successfully made it permeated not only in biochemistry and cell/molecular biology research, but also in numerous preclinical and clinical applications. However, our understanding of health and disease is still very limited. This lecture will introduce the latest breakthrough in laser microscopy technologies developed at HKU that can address some of these challenges. Especially these technologies can generate unprecedented views and understanding of the living biological cells. They include: capturing high-resolution motion picture of the swift-flying brain signals in a living animal; visualizing the inner workings of biological cells and organisms in 3D without killing them; and detecting rare cancer cells in millions of blood cells. Not only can these technologies impact new biological discovery (e.g. neuroscience), but also creating many new opportunities in cost-effective clinical diagnosis, especially cancer screening.
Kevin Tsia is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Program Director of the Biomedical Engineering Program at The University of Hong Kong. His research interest covers a broad range of subject matters including ultra-fast optical imaging for imaging flow cytometry and high-speed in-vivo brain imaging, bioinformatics approaches for single-cell analysis. He is currently the HK Research Grants Council (RGC) Research Fellow (2020). He received Early Career Award 2012-2013 by RGC in Hong Kong. He also received the Outstanding Young Research Award 2015 at HKU as well as 14th Chinese Science and Technology Award for Young Scientists in 2016. He is author or coauthor of over 200 journal publications conference papers and book chapters. He holds 4 granted and 6 pending US patents on ultrafast optical imaging technologies. He is a co-founder of start-up company commercializing the high speed microscopy technology for cancer treatment monitoring applications.
Clean water and clean air are vital for public health. This project focuses on developing high-efficiency and environmentally sustainable filters for removing harmful air/water pollutants. The team has developed novel architectures and functionalities for the filters to achieve high permeance, high removal efficiency, and excellent reusability.
