Lisa Poulikakos, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
University of California, San Diego
Seminar Information
The origin and progression of a variety of leading health challenges, encompassing Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, fibrosis and cancer, are directly linked to changes in the presence and orientation of fibrous matter in biological tissue. Here, we leverage the unique properties of anisotropic, colorimetric metasurfaces to scale down the complex manipulation of light and selectively visualize disease-relevant fiber density and orientation in biological tissue. Starting with the example of breast cancer diagnostics, we then expand our view to the rich palette of fiber-affecting diseases where metasurfaces hold great potential as rapid, precise, and low-cost tissue diagnostics with facile clinical implementation.
Lisa Poulikakos is an Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC San Diego. She received her PhD at ETH Zürich, where she studied chiral nanophotonics in the near and far field. Her postdoctoral research at Stanford University focused on developing functional nanophotonic surfaces for all-optical, on-chip and label-free cancer tissue diagnostics. She is a recipient of the ETH Medal, awarded to outstanding doctoral theses, the L’Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellowship, the SNSF Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship, the UCSD MRSEC New Investigator Award and the Beckman Young Investigator Award. She served as Chair of the 2018 Gordon Research Seminar in Plasmonics and Nanophotonics and was the founder and first president of "LIMES" the first student-run organization for female engineering students at ETH Zürich. Read more about Dr. Poulikakos in her interview with SPIE here.