Prof. Martin J. Leahy

Martin Leahy is a professor of applied physics and serial entrepreneur having been technical and/or managerial lead of several successful spin-out companies in biophotonics and energy. His main research interest is in the advancement of existing technologies such as laser Doppler and laser speckle as well as the development of new modalities such as TiVi and cmOCT for 2D, 3D and 4D imaging of the microcirculation. He has secured more than €7M in external R&D funding since 2007. Martin Leahy is scientific director of the National Biophotonics and Imaging Platform Ireland. He completed a DPhil in BioPhotonics at the University of Oxford and he and a colleague established Oxford Optronix Ltd., where he was Director of R&D. From 1995 he had various research and teaching posts at the University of Oxford. He then joined the Physics Department at the University of Limerick where his group specialized in tissue optics and microcirculation imaging and he lectures in physics. His research has been further commercialized by WheelsBridge AB and BHS Ltd. He is associateprofessor at the Royal College of Surgeons and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland. For 2010 he is invited speaker at several international conferences in Europe, USA and Asia; programme committee member, session chair and panel moderator for SPIE Photonics West in San Francisco and host of the BioPIC European BioImaging conference in Dublin. He is co-chair of Dynamics and Fluctuations in Biomedical Photonics at Photonics West. In both 2010 and 2011 he delivered a dozen international invited lectures and published more than a dozen ISI journal articles and 609 patents cite his work. He was appointed Chair of Applied Physics at NUI Galway in April 2011.