Andreas H. Hielscher received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University, Houston, Texas, in 1995. After spending 2 years as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, he joined the faculty at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. In September 2001 he moved to Columbia University in New York City, where he became the Director of the Biophotonics and Optical Radiology. He held appointments as Full Professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Radiology and served as Interim Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering from 2011 to 2012. In summer 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he moved across town to assume the chair position of the newly formed Department of Biomedical Engineering at New York University.
Dr. Hielscher’s work focuses on the development of state-of-the-art imaging software and hardware for optical tomography. Among his many pioneering contributions to this field are the introduction of transport-theory-based reconstruction algorithms both for absorption and fluorescence imaging, the development of the first fully digital-signal-processor (DSP) based optical tomographic imaging system, and the first three-
dimensional optical tomographic reconstruction of a complete rat brain and the human frontal lobe. Currently his team applies this emerging technology to imaging of cancer and joint diseases and uses it in support of drug development. He has published over 250 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and conference proceedings,
Hielscher’s work has been funded by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLB), the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), the National Cancer Institute, The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, the Whitaker Foundation for Biomedical Engineering, and the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research.
Dr. Hielscher currently serves as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions of Medical Imaging and has reviewed papers for over 40 scientific journals, including the Journal of Biomedical Optics, Optics Letters, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Medical Physics, and Physics Review Letters. He has been active in organizing conferences and meetings that promote the field of Biomedical Optics on more than 30 occasions. Among others, he was Chair of the Biomedical Optical Spectroscopy Group at the Optical Society of America (OSA), and chaired symposia and sessions on optical imaging at the IEEE –EMBS conferences. His is currently a member of the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference Program Committee on “Physiology, Function, and Structure from Medical Images,” and the OSA Conference Program Committee for “Advances in Optical Imaging and Photon Migration.” In addition, he frequently serves on review panels for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as several international funding agencies, such as the British Welcome Trust. He is listed in Marquis Who’s is Who in America since 2005, and is an elected member of the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
