Gabriel Popescu: The 2022 SPIE Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Optics
Editor's note: On 16 June, 2022, five months after this article was published, Gabriel Popescu died while visiting family in Romania.
Gabriel Popescu is a leading force in the emerging field of quantitative phase imaging (QPI), a form of label-free imaging which combines holography and optical microscopy. The William L. Everitt Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) heads his Quantitative Light Imaging Laboratory in the department of electrical and computer engineering as part of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He wrote the first QPI textbook, Quantitative Phase Imaging of Cells and Tissues, in 2011. Popescu has also pioneered spatial light interference microscopy (SLIM), a technology which combines Dennis Gabor's in-line holography, phase contrast microscopy, and phase shifting interferometry. This new technology enabled new studies of live cells, such as quantitative cell dry mass and growth measurements over many cell cycles.
Popescu, an SPIE Fellow, has developed several new courses at UIUC, including Optics Imaging, Modern Light Microscopy, and Fourier Optics, as well as mentoring students and postdocs who have continued onto successful careers in both industry and academia. The advisor to the UIUC SPIE student chapter since 2007 and a participant on NIH, NSF, and international funding agency review committees, Popescu is also a member of SPIE's Journal of Biomedical Optics editorial board. In 2015, he founded the SPIE Quantitative Phase Imaging conference within Photonics West — leading it ever since — as well as chairing the Unconventional Optical Imaging conference at Photonics Europe in recent years.
"I have known Dr. Popescu's work for many years since he was a postdoc at the G.R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory at MIT," says Keisuke Goda, a professor in the University of Tokyo's department of chemistry as well as adjunct professor at UCLA's department of bioengineering and Wuhan University's Institute of Technological Sciences. "I was part of the LIGO Group and attended a seminar that he gave at the MIT OSA Student Chapter. I distinctively remember how the audience watched in awe as a red blood cell fluctuated at the nanoscale imaged by diffraction phase microscopy, a new method developed by Dr. Popescu. Since then, Dr. Popescu has made impressive progress at the forefront of quantitative phase imaging, advancing the technology to the point where it is possible for a biologist with no engineering background to use the instrument independently. But it is important to stress that Dr. Popescu is not content just developing instruments: through a vast network of collaborators from medicine and biology, he has published numerous high-impact papers on a variety of applications, including red-blood-cell imaging, neuroscience, cell growth, and cancer diagnosis. He is a clear leader of the phase imaging field which is bringing optical information processing and digital holography to biomedicine, as well as being exemplary in his engagement with the wider optics community."
Meet the other 2022 SPIE Society Award winners.
Read more about Gabriel Popescu and the SPIE Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Optics.
