Dr. Lihong Wang serves as the Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where he chairs the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering. Previously, he held the distinguished Gene K. Beare Professorship of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis before his recruitment to Caltech in 2017. He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in optics engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 1984 and 1987, respectively, followed by a Ph.D. from Rice University. His career trajectory demonstrates exceptional progression from foundational optics research to leadership in advanced biomedical imaging technologies at premier academic institutions.
Dr. Wang pioneered revolutionary photoacoustic imaging technologies that enable noninvasive visualization deep within biological tissues, breaking the long-standing optical diffusion limit and establishing the only modality capable of multiscale high-resolution functional and molecular imaging across organelles, cells, tissues, and entire organisms. His laboratory produced the world's fastest camera through compressed ultrafast photography, which captured mind-blowing video sequences of laser pulses propagating through media using single-shot imaging techniques. With over 590 peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals including Nature and Science, his work has garnered extraordinary impact with a Google Scholar h-index of 149 and more than 93,000 citations, fundamentally transforming biomedical imaging capabilities for both research and potential clinical applications.
Beyond his technical innovations, Dr. Wang has profoundly shaped the biomedical optics community through dedicated leadership and mentorship, having supervised 106 research faculty and 60 doctoral students while delivering nearly 600 invited talks worldwide. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics from 2010 to 2017 and has received numerous prestigious honors including election to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 for his inventions in photoacoustic microscopy. Currently directing the Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, one of the largest research groups at Caltech, his ongoing work in computed ultrafast photography, photoacoustic tomography, and quantum optics continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in biomedical imaging, positioning his research at the forefront of next-generation diagnostic technologies with transformative potential for medical science.
