Publications, funding, new collaborations, awards, arrivals and talks from the Laser Biomedical Research Center.
Rochester, New York · 27 September – 1 October 2026
Jeon Woong Kang speaks on the center's work in noninvasive optical sensing.
Nugget Casino Resort, Sparks, Nevada · 4–9 October 2026
Peter So speaks in the special session honoring Rohith Reddy of the University of Houston, recipient of the Clara Craver Award. SciX is the annual meeting of the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies.
Conference site →
NIH campus, Bethesda, Maryland · 26–28 October 2026
"Fabrication of 3D Nano-Optics via Implosion Carving" — three-dimensional multiphoton patterning used not for imaging but for building optics, at a resolution of tens of nanometers, through the implosion fabrication process developed in the Boyden laboratory. The talk covers a current implementation of the method, its use for three-dimensional meta-optics, early characterization of how those optics perform, and first applications in imaging and sensing. The symposium is chaired by Tomasz Tkaczyk of Rice University and Brian Applegate of the University of Southern California, and opens with remarks from Bruce Tromberg, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
Luria Auditorium, MIT Koch Institute, 500 Main Street, Cambridge · 3–4 November 2026
The center's annual workshop brings together academic, clinical and industrial groups working towards glucose measurement without a needle. Twenty-three speakers from universities, hospitals and device companies across the United States, Europe and Asia, over a day and a half of talks and discussion. Organized by Jeon Woong Kang. Download the flyer.
Program and registration →
Label-free hyperspectral Raman imaging combined with single-nucleus RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics resolves senescent cells in mouse lung and skin without labels or dissociation, and identifies a conserved lipid-linked Raman signature that marks p21+ senescent cells in situ. Ke Zhang, Xingjian Chen, Francesco Monticolo and the center's Salvatore Sorrentino contributed equally; the study is led with Jian Shu at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute, and forms part of the publication package from the NIH Cellular Senescence Network.
Read the paper →MIT News →
Dr. Jeongmoo Han joins the center as a postdoctoral associate. He comes from Hongki Yoo's laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at KAIST, where he worked on fluorescence lifetime imaging and optical coherence tomography for cardiovascular diagnosis.
Su Jin Hong, of Dongguk University, joins the center for six months from 1 September.
The National Institutes of Health approved an administrative supplement to "Single-cell label-free identification of senescence by Raman microscopy and spatial genomics", the center's project within the NIH Common Fund's Cellular Senescence Network (SenNet). The work builds SenNetRaman, a platform that reads the molecular heterogeneity of senescent cells without labels or dissociation, by pairing hyperspectral Raman microscopy with single-cell and spatial genomics and machine learning. With Jian Shu at Massachusetts General Hospital; the project runs to 2027.
About SenNet →
"MOSAIC: Multimodal Omics Synthesis via AI-driven Image Contextualization" was selected in the consortium's second-year round, from a pool of 188 submissions. The project runs from July 2026 to June 2027, with Jian Shu at Massachusetts General Hospital.
About the consortium →
Alex Matlock leaves the center after his work on quantitative phase imaging and single-cell analysis of sickle cell disease. He is now an assistant research scientist in Nicholas Durr's laboratory in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
Durr Lab at Johns Hopkins →
Anthony Bae joins the center to work on label-free optical and computational approaches linking imaging features to molecular phenotypes.
Jeon Woong Kang and Arianna Bresci presented the center's noninvasive glucose sensing work to a medical-device audience at the Menino Convention and Exhibition Center in Boston.
Patterning vacancies in a hydrogel and then shrinking it isotropically produces three-dimensional structures precise enough for visible light, opening a route to optical components that would be difficult to fabricate any other way. The work joins the So and Boyden laboratories at MIT with first author Quansan Yang, now at the University of Washington, and Dushan Wadduwage, now at Old Dominion University, and was supported in part by the MIT-Fujikura Partnership Fund.
Read the paper →
Jeon Woong Kang is guest editor of the special section "New Technology for Glucose Monitoring" in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, and of the special collection "Glucose Sensing" in npj Biosensing.
An MIT-India seed fund, part of the MIT Global Seed Funds program, supports "A Portable, Affordable, and Label-Free Optical Imaging Platform for Anemia Screening in the Developing World" through January 2028, with Rishikesh Pandey of the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering at IIT Roorkee, who leads the BRIGHT Lab there. Dr. Pandey visited the center over the summer.
"AI-Powered Virtual Histopathology with Molecular Interpretability at Single-Cell Resolution" was funded in the first round of the MIT-MGB Seed Program, run through MIT HEALS with support from Analog Devices. The work combines Raman spectroscopy with spatial omics for skin cancer diagnosis, with Jian Shu and Christine Lian in the Department of Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital. A second-round proposal has been interviewed and is awaiting a decision.
About the program →
Jeon Woong Kang gave a keynote presentation at SPIE ABC 2025 in Jeju, Korea.
The MIT-Czech Republic IOCB Tech Foundation Seed Fund supports MICROCOSM — multimodal microscopy combining Raman spectroscopy and quantitative phase imaging for cancer studies — with Jan Přibyl, who heads the Nanobiotechnology Core Facility at CEITEC, Masaryk University in Brno. His team will visit the center this fall.
