People
Professor Kishan Dholakia (FRSE, OSA Fellow, SPIE Fellow) is a professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. He has worked for a number of years as a postdoctoral research fellow, a Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Fellow, and now as a permanent member of staff. His research interests cover pretty much everything related to optics.
Graham Bruce
Senior Research Laboratory Manager
[email protected]
+44 (0)1334 463019
ORCID: 0000-0003-3403-0614
Graham Bruce is a senior researcher and laboratory manager in the group. He graduated from University of St Andrews with an MPhys degree in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics and remained in St Andrews to complete a PhD in ultracold atoms and the generation of novel optical trapping geometries. His postdoctoral research was carried out at University of Strathclyde, constructing the world’s first quantum gas microscope for fermionic atoms, and back in St Andrews developing cold-atom rotation sensors. He joined the Optical Manipulation group as a research fellow, and has diversified his research interests to work on optical trapping and cooling in vacuum, speckle metrology and Raman spectroscopy.
Anja Lykke Borre is a visiting researcher as part of her PhD fellowship at the Technical University of Denmark. She obtained an MSc in photonics engineering in 2020, specialising in biophotonics. For her PhD project, she works with multi-photon light-sheet microscopy and optical beam shaping tailored for in vivo applications. That is, designing and implementing approachable solutions using propagation-invariant beams for two-photon light-sheet microscopy.spectroscopy to study hydrocarbon phase transitions. She then became a PDRA exploring the applications of Raman spectroscopy and surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) in drug discovery and medical diagnostics.
Stella Corsetti joined the Optical Manipulation Group as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in February 2018. Her research includes the use of advanced optical and imaging techniques for biomedical applications and medical diagnostics. She obtained her BSc in Biomedical Engineering and her MSc in Bio-Nanotechnology Engineering from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, and her PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Aberdeen. Her project involved the use of single particle manipulation techniques and Raman and Infrared spectroscopy to study hydrocarbon phase transitions. She then became a PDRA exploring the applications of Raman spectroscopy and surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) in drug discovery and medical diagnostics.
George Okyere Dwapanyin
Research Fellow
[email protected]
+44 (0)1334 461653
ORCID: 0000-0003-2475-4969
George Okyere Dwapanyin joined the group as a research fellow in January 2021 with research focusing on advanced optical imaging techniques. He has a PhD from Stellenbosch University, South Africa where his dissertation focused on the development of a multimodal imaging system for Biophotonics applications. His previous education includes a BSc in Physics from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, MSc in Optics and Photonics from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, and MSc in Photonics Engineering, Nanophotonics and Biophotonics from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain after having being part of the pioneering batch of the Erasmus Mundus Europhotonics master program.
Morgan Facchin obtained a Bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Avignon, and a Master’s degree in astrophysics from the University of Toulouse. In 2017 and 2018 he worked on phase singularities and superoscillations in solar waves. Then he joined the Optical Manipulation group in 2019 to work on new ways of harnessing laser speckle patterns for high accuracy measurements, successfully completing his PhD in November 2022.
Saba N. Khan is a research fellow working on optical manipulation with structured light and Laser speckle metrology. Before joining University of St Andrews, she was a Postdoctoral fellow in Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India where she was working on polarization singular beams. She received her PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, working on few-mode fiber sensors. Her previous education includes a Bachelor’s degree in Physics & Mathematics from Lucknow University and Master’s degree in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India.
Ané Kritzinger
PhD Student (joint with Centre of Light for Life, Adelaide)
[email protected]
+44 (0) 1334 46xxx
Ané Kritzinger joined the group in July 2023 as a joint PhD student with the Centre of Light for Life at the University of Adelaide in Australia. She obtained a Master of Science from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Her MSc research project laid the groundwork for a novel analytical technique by combining holographic optical tweezers and fluorescence spectroscopy of quantum dots, bridging the fields of environmental chemistry and photonics. For her PhD research she will explore applications of Raman spectroscopy.
Manuel graduated from INAOE in Mexico. His Masters project consisted on new applications of non-diffracting beams for optical trapping by implementing the optical tweezers toolbox and the use of beam shaping techniques at The University of Queensland, Australia. His joined the Optical Manipulation Group to pursue his PhD Project in micromanipulation in liquid, air and vacuum.
Lewis McMillan joined the group in October 2020 as a postdoctoral research fellow in Computational Methods for Image Analysis in Biophotonics. He obtained his PhD in computational physics from the University of St Andrews which focussed on using the Monte Carlo method to simulate the transport of light in tissue for various biophotonic and medical applications. Lewis was previously a research fellow in Computer Science and Astrophysics at the University of St Andrews where he used machine learning to classify images of dolphins from drone videos, and optimised galaxy image analysis codes. His interests lie in using code to solve various research problems in the fields of marine biology, biophotonics, medicine, and physics.
Josephine Morizet is a postdoctoral research fellow working on the development of new light sheet microscope modalities dedicated to biological applications. She graduated in optical engineering from the Institute of Optics at the University of Paris-Saclay in 2016, then she completed her PhD at the Laboratory of Optics and Biosciences (Ecole Polytechnique, France) where she investigated the potential of polarisation-resolved THG microscopy to probe biomaterials structure.
Chetna Taneja joined the group as a research fellow in January 2023. She is currently working in Point spread function engineering for particle localization in light-sheet microscopy. She obtained her PhD degree from IISER Pune India in Plasmonics with a part of her PhD work at Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge as Commonwealth split-site fellow. Her PhD work was focussed on studying the light propagation and confinement at subwavelength scales using plasmonic silver nanowire and nanowire over mirror nanocavities. She received her master’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee and Undergraduate from Delhi University in India.
Philip Wijesinghe
[email protected]
+44 (0)1334 461653
ORCID: 0000-0002-8378-7261
Philip Wijesinghe joined the group as a Research Fellow in 2018, with a focus on merging theory, computational and numerical methods towards imaging in biophotonics and biophysics. In particular, he works in light-sheet and multiphoton microscopy, with a focus on computational imaging via multiplexing, sparce sensing and recovery, and deep learning. Previously, he was a Research Associate in the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research and a PhD Student in the Optical+Biomedical Engineering Laboratory (OBEL) in the University of Western Australia. There his work focused on the development of optical coherence tomography-based methods to image the mechanical properties of tissues and cells towards applications in cell mechanobiology, cardiology and oncology.
Key Collaborators
Peter Andersen
Department of Health Technology,
Technical University of Denmark
Shanti Bhattacharya
Department of Electrical Engineering,
IIT Madras
Kylie Dunning
Adelaide Medical School,
University of Adelaide
Malte Gather
School of Physics and Astronomy,
University of St Andrews
Stephen Gillespie
School of Medicine,
University of St Andrews
Frank Gunn-Moore
School of Biology,
University of St Andrews
Thomas Krauss
Department of Physics,
University of York
Takashige Omatsu
Molecular Chirality Research Centre,
Chiba University
Silvia Paracchini
School of Medicine,
University of St Andrews
Michael Prystowsky
Department of Pathology,
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
James Pullman
Department of Pathology,
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Ewan Wright
College of Optical Sciences,
University of Arizona
