Brian W Pogue PhD – Laboratory PI
Brian founded the MOXI research group when he came to serve as Chair of the Department of Medical Physics in 2022. His research program focuses on development of unique optical tools and techniques for advanced surgery and radiation therapy guidance, photodynamic therapy, molecular imaging, and theranostics. He has raised $42 Million in NIH funding, translated dozens of imaging systems into human trials, and published >475 scientific peer-reviewed articles. He is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics, and elected Fellow of AIMBE, Optica, SPIE, AAPM & the National Academy of Inventors.
Matthew Reed – Laboratory Manager
Matthew runs lab operations, coordinates lab resources, and acts as the lab’s main animal surgery resource. His research focuses on examining biomarkers to be used for diagnostics and assessment, especially for fluorescence-guided surgery. His background in biology and chemistry has facilitated his participation in other research areas, such as FLASH radiotherapy and molecular oxygen-sensing. He plans to eventually pursue an MD, but hopes his research in surgical imaging leads to continued opportunities to research, innovate, and impact medicine.
Xu Cao – Associate Scientist
Héctor García Ph.D. – Associate Scientist
Héctor is a physicist with Biomedical Optics and Near Infrared Spectroscopy as main backgrounds. He spent the last few years modeling photon migration in tissue, both analytically and with numerical simulations, specially focusing on how tissue heterogeneity affects light propagation. He’s also skilled in experimental techniques involving diffuse optical imaging and single photon counting. Now he is devoted to making use of all this to model and measure fluorescence, particularly by means of indocyanine green and Protoporphyrin IX, towards applications in fields such as Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging and Fluorescence-Guided Surgery.
Marien Ochoa PhD – Post Doctoral Fellow
Marien leads development of fluorescence guided surgery devices and tools for molecular sensing in vivo with x-rays and light. She is a biomedical engineer with a strong background in fluorescence-lifetime imaging, optics, and deep learning. Marien is currently working on the imaging of Protoporphyrin IX delayed-fluorescence for real-time understanding of tissue hypoxia in tissues at the macroscopic level. She is also examining the use of extrinsic oxygen markers (specifically Oxyphor-2P) for a better understanding of PO2 levels across different tissues.
Madhusudan Kulkarni Ph.D. – Post Doctoral Fellow
Madhusudan works towards designing and developing fiber optic-driven fluorescence-based imaging/sensing devices for in vivo biomedical applications. He is an instrumentation engineer with a strong background in developing automated, integrated, and miniaturized biomedical devices for point-of-care testing (POCT) applications. Madhusudan is currently developing an optical tomography system that couples onto an ultrasound transducer combined with ultrasound imaging of tissue stiffness and later performing optical spectroscopy of the tissue. He works on the hardware setup and building the logic for interfacing with software protocol.
Aleksandra “Sasha” Ilina – Post Doctoral Fellow
William Thomas – PhD Student
Will Thomas is the UW “FLASH guy.” Will’s research is two-fold. His first focus is uncovering the mechanism of the FLASH tissue-sparing effect. Currently, Will is working on developing and testing radiobiological assays to observe the effects of reactive oxygen species on tissue damage. Second, Will is examining suitable methodologies for visualizing Cherenkov emission of Tomotherapy systems.
Alexander Niver – PhD Student
Alexander is currently working to introduce the use of time-gated cameras and scintillators to instantly measure the dose delivered to patients under Total Body Irradiation (TBI) conditions. This includes calibrating scintillator response to dose and background light level, correcting for differences in scintillator-to-camera angles, and monitoring TBI treatments administered to anthropomorphic phantoms. As this research evolves, it is anticipated to then move towards best practices, including ideal combinations of scintillators and cameras, camera placement, and human trials.
Aubrey Parks – PhD Student
Aubrey’s current research focus involves imaging broad spectrum Cherenkov radiation. By characterizing the emitted spectrum and comparing the relative intensities of spectra emitted from different sides of the body, she aims to gain an understanding of how the Cherenkov radiation is both created and emitted at different depths. This understanding is important because it furthers the knowledge of the effect of radiation therapy on the body.
Jeremy Hallett – PhD Student
Jeremy’s work is centered around improving the visual quality of Cherenkov imaging for QA purposes. Images produced by Cherenkov cameras are plagued with noise and poor resolution. This noise is difficult to avoid because of the low photon conditions inherent in Cherenkov imaging. Jeremy seeks to use developed methods for still image denoising along with super resolution techniques to improve the quality of both cumulative and single frame Cherenkov data.
Kendall Jarvis – Research Technician
Kendall is an undergraduate researcher studying physics and mathematics with hopes of pursuing medical physics in graduate school. Her research is primarily in FLASH radiotherapy. Her current project focuses on how photosensitizers such as 5-aminolevulenic acid (5-ALA) produce changes in vascular permeability in tissues, and how these might be changed using FLASH. She also assists her colleagues researching photodynamic therapy and fluorescence-guided surgery.
Barley and Basil – Lab Mascots
Barley and Basil got their undergraduate degrees at Dartmouth College before coming to UW for their PhDs. Currently, their research involves quantifying the sidewalk traffic in front of Brian’s house. They have sat in on countless virtual meetings and presentations, and between them have several years of medical physics experience. That is several decades in dog years, making the duo the most senior members of the MOXI lab.