Professor Jianwei Miao stands as a world-renowned leader in advanced imaging techniques and nanoscale structural analysis. He currently holds dual appointments as Professor of Physics & Astronomy and a faculty member at the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jianwei Miao was born in November 1969, he completed his academic foundation with a Bachelor of Science from Hangzhou University (now Zhejiang University) in 1991, followed by a Master of Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1994. After earning his Ph.D. in Physics, along with a Master of Science in Computer Science and an Advanced Graduate Certificate in Biomedical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1999, he launched his professional career as a Staff Scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, where he remained until 2004 before joining UCLA as an Assistant Professor, subsequently being promoted to Full Professor in 2009.
Professor Miao pioneered coherent diffractive imaging (CDI), also known as lensless imaging or computational microscopy, through his seminal 1999 experiment that successfully extended X-ray crystallography to determine structures of non-crystalline specimens. This groundbreaking technique has been broadly implemented worldwide using synchrotron radiation, X-ray free electron lasers, high harmonic generation, optical lasers, and electrons, becoming one of the major justifications for the construction of X-ray free electron lasers globally. In 2005, he developed the equally sloped tomography (EST) method, which when combined with electron microscopy, achieved electron tomography at 2.4 Å resolution in 2012, representing the highest resolution ever achieved in any general 3D imaging method. His research group further advanced this technology to observe nearly all atoms within a platinum nanoparticle and to image the 3D core structure of edge and screw dislocations in materials at atomic resolution for the first time.
Professor Miao's research program continues to push the frontiers of high-resolution 3D X-ray and electron imaging, with applications spanning the physical and biological sciences. His interdisciplinary work elegantly bridges the domains of physics, materials science, nanoscience, and biology, fostering numerous cross-disciplinary collaborations and applications. In 2025, he published a single-author review article in Nature titled Computational microscopy with coherent diffractive imaging and ptychography that encapsulated 25 years of advancements in computational imaging. As principal investigator of the Coherent Imaging Group at UCLA, he maintains an active research agenda currently focused on dynamical electron tomography at the atomic scale, continuing to develop and refine methods that enable unprecedented visualization of nanoscale structures with profound implications for materials science and nanotechnology development worldwide.
