The Laser Biomedical Research Center grew out of one of the oldest and most storied laboratories at MIT — a place that has continually reinvented itself around each new way of using light.
The LBRC is part of the MIT George R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory (SpecLab), conceived in 1931 by MIT President Karl Compton with George Harrison as its first director. Over the following decades SpecLab was instrumental in landmark achievements in atomic spectroscopy and beyond — from the compilation of the MIT Wavelength Tables of atomic spectral lines to the development of some of the highest-quality optical diffraction gratings ever made.
In the 1950s the laboratory was among the pioneers of infrared and Raman molecular spectroscopy. With the advent of the laser in the 1960s, it led research in visible spectroscopy, and Charles Townes and his collaborators pioneered the study of stimulated Raman and Brillouin scattering. Throughout, SpecLab has been distinguished by a single habit: adopting each new spectroscopic technique, exploring it scientifically, finding its important biomedical applications, and building instruments to put it in the hands of the wider community. The Spectroscopy Laboratory maintains its own site at web.mit.edu/spectroscopy.
The Laser Biomedical Research Center was established in October 1985 as a research resource in laser biomedicine under the direction of Michael Feld, originally formed as an NIH National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) center. Sustained by continued NIH support, it became a home for both permanent staff and visiting researchers pursuing basic and applied research in laser biophotonics — with laboratories and instruments designed for the study of laser–tissue interactions, the spectroscopy of biological cells and tissues, and the spectral diagnosis of disease.
Following Michael Feld's passing, the center was reorganized under Prof. Peter T. C. So and re-established as a research resource center of the NIH National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). During this period, Prof. So was joined by several co-principal investigators — Prof. Moungi Bawendi, Dr. Ramachandra Dasari, Prof. Ishan Barman, Prof. Conor Evans, Prof. Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, Dr. Zahid Yaqoob, and Dr. Jeon Woong Kang — with Prof. Bawendi and Dr. Dasari each serving as Associate Director at different times.
Among the center's most influential contributions are the development of multimodal spectroscopy — combining diffuse reflectance, fluorescence, and Raman spectroscopy for non-invasive diagnosis of tissue disease state; quantitative phase microscopy for non-invasive measurement of cellular rheology, morphology, and protein dry mass; and transdermal Raman spectroscopy for non-invasive glucose sensing. Work seeded at the LBRC has also gone on to found companies, including FemtoFab, MediSight, and GlcoSight.
Arguably the center's single greatest accomplishment, however, is its people: across its history the LBRC and SpecLab have trained several generations of leaders in biophotonics, including roughly thirty who now hold faculty positions at leading universities around the world.
Today, the LBRC has sunset as a NIBIB research resource. However, under the leadership of Professor Peter T. C. So and Dr. Jeon Woong Kang, we maintain similar operational functions in serving the biomedical community — continuing to develop and disseminate light-based measurement technologies across fluorescence and multiphoton microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, interferometric imaging, and nanofabrication, and to support collaborators and users across biology and medicine. Explore the current research →