Aydogan Ozcan, Ph.D.

Aydogan Ozcan, Ph.D.

Chancellor’s Professor at University of California, Los Angeles; Professor, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Aydogan, armed with a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford, is on a mission to “democratize biomedical imaging, sensing and diagnostics tools and technologies so that advanced measurements that are normally restricted to resource-rich laboratories and institutions can be conducted in resource-limited environments, including in developing countries.” Aydogan holds 34 issued patents and more than 20 pending patent applications for inventions in telemedicine, mobile health, nanoscopy, wide-field imaging, lensless imaging, nonlinear optics, fiber optics and optical coherence tomography. Notably, he pioneered lightweight, 3-D-printed smartphone attachments that can diagnose diseases such as malaria and HIV and detect pathogens in water. These mobile devices are portable and cost-effective, making them practical for use in biomedicine as well as environmental monitoring in rural and resource-poor areas.