Interdisciplinary Annual Meeting of Photonics4Life

“If you feel sick, go see the physicist!” Is this the future of health care? No, but imagine medicine today without x-rays or microscopes – inventions all made by physicists long ago. In the 21st century the rise of cancer, heart diseases, AIDS, and emerging pandemic threats pose new and staggering challenges to the medical community. As affordable and effective healthcare would ideally be available to all of mankind and hence it is more important than ever that the scientific and medical communities unite in their efforts.

A major challenge is to ensure that cutting edge developments in the diverse and separate fields of physics, engineering, chemistry, and biology are rapidly applied to the medical theatre. Enter photonics4life - a pan European network, established to address this need. Photonics4life organizes huge interdisciplinary meetings, as so far this is supposed to be the most efficient way to tackle emerging healthcare threats - bringing together the disparate groups of science and medicine. In the field of Biophotonics light-based technologies are applied to problems in medicine and life sciences. Today about 100 of Europe‘s leading Biophotonics experts are coming together in St. Andrews, Scotland, for their 2nd Annual Meeting to discuss priority healthcare issues. A diverse array of medical professionals, specialising in cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and immunology will engage directly with laser physicists, lab-on-a-chip technologists, and advanced microscopists to tackle new collaborative efforts under the banner of understanding, diagnosing, and treating emerging healthcare needs.

Leading researchers in this field will attend the meeting including luminaries like:

Prof. Ghulam Nabi

The uro-oncologist surgeon is an expert in laproscopic radical prostatectomy, and seeks to apply advanced imaging techniques to improve clinical outcomes.

Prof. Hugo Thienpont

Coming from electro engineering he became Europe‘s leading scientist for micro optics, which he uses to develop biochips that can replace entire labs.

Prof. John Girkin

By bringing adaptive optics, originally developed for astronomy, to the cell level he investigates new approaches for Biophotonics.

Prof. Simon Herrington

As a biochemist and pathologist he investigates spectrosopic approaches for the early diagnosis of different types of cancer.

Prof. Jürgen Popp

With the specific reflection of laser light he gathers the so called molecular _ ngerprint of cells to distinguish between different types of cancer cells.

Prof. Kishan Dholakia

He uses light to physically manipulate cells: laser scissors and tweezers can move or sort cells, or inject drugs into them with nanometer precision