Jin Kang: Developing smarter tools for microsurgery

Jin U. Kang is a professor and chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Johns Hopkins University (JHU, Baltimore, MD). He conducts research on biophotonics, fiber optics, and optoelectronic devices for applications in medicine and communications. One of the main focus areas of his research is to develop real-time, ultrafast optical coherence tomography, 3-D imaging and sensing systems for guided surgical intervention.

Prior to joining the JHU faculty in 1998, he was a research scientist with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. He has developed various fiber sources, from single-longitudinal-mode tunable lasers to mode-locked femtosecond lasers. He was also the first to experimentally demonstrate the existence of several important novel effects and devices, including Manakov spatial solitons and backward-propagating second-harmonic generation.

Kang has published over 130 journal papers and 180 conference publications, including more than 40 SPIE publications. He has given numerous invited talks at international conferences, and serves on the program committee of the Optical Fibers and Sensors for Medical Diagnostics and Treatment Applications conference, held annually at SPIE Photonics West. He also chaired the conference on Image-Guided Intervention/Surgery at the SPIE/National Institutes of Health (NIH) Workshop on Optical Diagnostic and Biophotonic Methods from Bench to Bedside in 2011.

He earned a BS in physics from Western Washington University, and both MS and PhD degrees from the School of Optics (CREOL) at the University of Central Florida.