Grant: Collaborative Research and Training Experience

The future of progress in Life Sciences, from understanding basic biochemistry to complex biological organisms and environmental issues, hinges critically on our ability to improve our ways to study and manipulate molecules and living organisms with increased precision and reduced invasiveness. The use of light provides such opportunities, particularly with the increased availability and maturity of well suited technologies, such as lasers, fiber optics, microscopes, sensitive detectors and novel nanoprobes. Life scientists, in the field or in the lab, need better tools to track events inside living cells, bacteria in soil or water, pollutants and viruses in the air, cancer cells in tumors, metabolite level in blood, transgenic crops across fields, and malaria infection. Such tools can be made with optical technologies, and indeed the field of Biophotonics is at a turning point: though photonics technologies have been developed and greatly improved the quality and productivity of life science research, medicine and several industries, the demands to overcome the current limits of these technologies are growing rapidly. However, a major constraint in the development of innovative Biophotonics approaches is the lack of true transdisciplinary expertise at the interface between biological sciences and optics/photonics- that is, experts who understand both the biological problem at hand and the technology that can be used to address it. The main objective of this CREATE program is to provide trainees, enrolled in Biophotonics Research, with true transdisciplinary training at the interface between Life Sciences and Optics/Photonics. The Biophotonics Training Program is expected to train a new generation of Highly Qualified Personnel who will be able to develop the tools and approaches of the future to, for example, study biological and environmental problems and contamination with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, to manipulate biological functions with exquisite precision, and to improve treatments of multiple medical conditions with optimal efficiency and minimal invasiveness.