Rosario Porras-Aguilar
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Engineering·Early-career
Some things are nearly impossible to see under a microscope. Living cells, for instance, barely absorb or scatter light, so they look almost invisible.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
quantitative phase imaging
label-free imaging
liquid crystals
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Build a mathematical framework for wavefront shaping, the control of light's phase front, that selectively enhances the spatial frequencies carrying information about a feature's size, shape, and orientation while suppressing background from small-angle scatter.
- Validate the derived models in a working optical system on low-visibility samples, meaning transparent objects and features small relative to the field of view, to test gains in signal-to-noise ratio and accurate 3D measurement.
- Exploit liquid crystals, soft materials whose optical behavior changes with applied voltage, as reconfigurable elements that let an imaging system adapt itself to the object or feature of interest.
- Assess the commercial translation potential of a compact, low-cost liquid-crystal attachment that converts conventional microscopes into real-time, label-free quantitative phase imaging systems, through interviews across the imaging industry ecosystem.
More about the research
Staining them with dyes adds contrast but can alter or kill them. Other features are lost because the instrument itself blurs or buries the information in background noise. Both projects here attack that problem by making the microscope itself adaptive, using liquid crystals, the same soft, light-bending materials found in screens, which change their optical properties in response to an applied voltage. Together the work spans the underlying optical theory and an effort to turn the resulting hardware into an affordable product.
Why it matters
Instruments that measure cell shape and behavior in detail are often too expensive for smaller laboratories, clinics, and classrooms. A low-cost attachment that turns an existing microscope into a label-free quantitative imaging system could widen access to such measurements and support disease diagnosis and cell biology research without staining or damaging samples. More accurate quantitative imaging could also aid pathology, personalized medicine, visual optics, and ultra-precision manufacturing inspection.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Roberto Paiella
Boston University, MA·Engineering
Design and fabricate dielectric metasurfaces on commercial CMOS sensor arrays to build a phase-imaging meta-sensor (PIMS) array that reconstructs optical phase quantitatively in a single shot.
Peter T. So
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Design optical compression schemes for differentiable microscopy by training front-end optics and the decompression algorithm together as one neural-network auto-encoder.
Stephen Boppart
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether adding optical coherence tomography, a light-based imaging method that sees behind the eardrum, to standard pneumatic otoscopy improves diagnostic accuracy and reduces antibiotic prescriptions in children presenting to primary care with ear pain or suspected otitis media.
The school
University of North Carolina at Charlotte: 9 labs on PI Pages, $95M a year on research, 196 research doctorates a year.
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