New trustee chair Ayman Abouraddy and reappointees Aristide Dogariu and Jayanta Kapat are among a handful of faculty members to have achieved the distinguished honor, which helps to retain and attract exceptional faculty. Established in 2003 by former Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ President John C. Hitt, are appointed for five years and receive a $50,000 annual stipend to advance their scholarship. Half of the stipend can be used as a salary supplement.

Deans nominate trustee chair , who are evaluated by a Trustee Chair Review Committee and affirmed by Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s president and provost.

“Talented and renowned faculty — such as those named as trustee chairs — are the foundation of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s academic excellence and key to us reaching our goals as a top public metropolitan research university,â€� says Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ President Alexander N. Cartwright. “We are grateful for these honored faculty and their impact in their respective fields and in the lives of our students. We look forward to their continued success and how they will further distinguish our university.â€�

The new terms begin in August. Here’s more about the most recent appointees, starting with new trustee chair Abouraddy from the College of Optics and Photonics.

Abouraddy joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ as an assistant professor in 2008. He has since established facilities for fabricating new classes of polymer and soft-glass fibers for applications ranging from mid-infrared optics to solar energy concentration. He is currently engaged in a new research area that he has pioneered known as “space-time optics and photonics,” which has led to major breakthroughs in optical physics over the past five years. He is a popular classroom teacher and an outstanding advisor to research students at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He earned a Ph.D. from Boston University in electrical engineering and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In nominating him, David Hagan, dean of the College of Optics and Photonics, said: “Dr. Abouraddy is an unusually outstanding scientist whose work has opened up new fields of study, and consequently has attracted research collaborations of the highest caliber. His work has been consistently published in high-impact journals and these publications have been highly cited. As a result, he has been able to build large, funded research programs that support his group and other collaborators at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ as well as at other universities across the United States.â€�

A Pegasus Professor in the College of Optics and Photonics, reappointee Dogariu’s research ranges from understanding fundamental aspects of light interaction with matter to actively developing new optical technology for sensing and measurement for a substance like blood. Dogariu created a new technology to monitor patient’s blood by using light scattering. He other honors include being a distinguished researcher in the College of Optics and Photonics. He earned his Ph.D. in engineering from Hokkaido University in Japan and joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ as a research professor in 1997.

In his nomination for Dogariu, Hagan said: “Dr. Dogariu is an exceptional professor who has performed outstanding research aimed at both fundamental understanding and the development of unique and impactful applications. At the same time, he is a dedicated teacher both in the classroom and in the research laboratory. His work and its applications have impacted a broad range of science and he has had a positive impact on many others at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½, though his many collaborations on biomedical photonics, particularly with junior faculty. He has also developed many collaborations with leading researchers worldwide.â€�

Kapat, a reappointee from the College of Engineering and Computer Science, is the founding director of the Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research or CATER, and associate director for Florida Center for Advanced Aero-Propulsion, a hub for research and development of advanced turbomachinery and energy systems. He joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ in 1997 and has been recognized for his valuable leadership, scholarly research of national and international impact and outstanding teaching and service. He earned his Doctorate of Science in Mechanical Engineering from MIT.

In nominating him, Michael Georgopoulous, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, said: “Most notably, Professor Kapat’s excellence is a driver for the success of so many faculty and students around him and is a source of strength for the mechanical and aerospace Department … and our university. The most significant impact of Professor Kapat stems from his vision for CATER. … His unique vision has brought together 10 core faculty members with multidisciplinary capabilities that provide a synergistic approach, like no other, towards solving some of the most complex research problems in Turbomachinery for Power Generation, Aviation and Space Propulsion.â€�

The appointments align with Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s goals of retaining and recruiting outstanding faculty in its strategic plan, “Unleashing Potential: Becoming the University for the Future.â€�

Their real-time blood monitor provides instant blood analysis to let surgeons know if a deadly problem in many surgeries — blood coagulation — is happening.

Current tests can take up to 30 minutes, which is too long to wait on results when every second counts. This is especially important during surgery on the youngest patients, such as infants.

The researchers’ latest work, published recently in the journal , is a numerical model that quantifies how the device works and adds further validation to its effectiveness.

“Right now, if we want to determine if the blood in a patient undergoing heart surgery is thin enough so that it won’t form clots in the heart-lung machine, we have to draw blood from the patient periodically, throughout the entire operation, and then send it to a laboratory to get tested,� says study co-author William DeCampli, a pediatric cardiac surgeon at Orlando Health Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children.

“There are two problems there,â€� says DeCampli, who is also a professor of surgery in the Department of Clinical Sciences in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Medicine. “One, we’re drawing blood from a patient periodically, and if this patient is a newborn baby, it doesn’t take much blood drawn to cause the baby to have a problem with blood loss. Secondly, when we send these tests away, it takes time to get the answer back, as much as 20 or 30 minutes. And that’s too long.â€�

DeCampli has been working with Aristide Dogariu, a Pegasus Professor in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Optics and Photonics, since 2017 to develop the blood monitor. The device has already successfully advanced through one clinical trial and is scheduled for a next clinical trial this year.

The collaboration came about as the result of a meeting at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ where DeCampli learned about Dogariu’s work using light scattering from a laser to measure the thickness of various fluids and mixtures.

Since then, the optics-based blood monitor has moved through in-lab testing and then a successful clinical trial, the results of which were published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

The monitor uses an extremely small optical fiber that’s a fraction of a millimeter in diameter to assess the status of the blood and can be inserted directly into the tubes of a heart-lung machine or in a catheter, without having to withdraw blood from the patient.

In the latest study, the researchers demonstrated that they could quantify the mechanical properties of plasma that surrounds the red blood cells, which is key to describing the light fluctuations they use to determine if blood is beginning to coagulate.

Their model was validated by optical microrheology measurements in laboratory-controlled conditions and in clinical environments involving both natural, intrinsic processes and external interventions.

“The really nice thing about this current study is that Dr. Dogariu and his team were able to show that there is actually a fairly straightforward relationship between the measurements and two fundamental quantities that characterize the mechanical behavior of blood,� DeCampli says.

This is essential information that can be used as the technology moves its way toward widespread release, Dogariu says.

“We developed a model that has been essentially confirmed by the experimental results that we have collected,� he says. “We had the measurements that appear to be quite sensitive to real transformations in the bloodstream, but now we can put numbers to those changes.�

The work allows the researchers to, for the first time, relate their measurements to what was actually happening to the blood and explain the changes in the way that red blood cells “jiggle� around in the blood stream.

“This is what we consider to be the next level in the development of this concept,� Dogariu says.

The researchers’ next clinical trial will take place with pediatric patients, and then they hope to move into a series of clinical trials with adults. With continued success and funding, the researchers hope to see the blood monitor become available within the next five to seven years.

Study co-authors also included Jose Rafael Guzman-Sepulveda, a graduate of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Optics and Photonics doctoral program and now a researcher with the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico; and Mahed Batarseh and Ruitao Wu, graduate research assistants in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Optics and Photonics.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Dogariu received his doctoral degree in engineering from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, and joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ in 1997.

DeCampli received his doctoral degree in astrophysics from Harvard University and his doctor of medicine degree from the University of Miami. He completed residency in cardiac surgery at Stanford University and joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Medicine in 2009.

Aristide Dogariu, a Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ Pegasus Professor of Optics and Photonics, and his colleagues published a paper in this month demonstrating how to passively sense an object even when direct vision is impeded.

It’s a bit complicated, but the new sensing method the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ team developed could lends itself to a number of practical applications, including use in defense, surveillance, search and rescue and medicine.

Imagine trying to see something around a corner. This is easily done with mirrors, but imagine that light from the object can only reach the detector after it bounces off a diffusing wall that acts like a shattered mirror. Even though light looks totally dispersed, some of its initial properties do not completely vanish. Dogariu and his colleagues were able to measure subtle similarities in the scattered light, undo the effects of this broken mirror, and get an idea of what lies around the corner.

“The fact that fundamental properties are not completely destroyed when light bounces off a diffuse medium like a wall can be used in so many different ways,� says Dogariu. “The question is, how much information you can still recover through this broken mirror-like surface.�

When a digital picture is taken, the spatial distribution of light across an object is mapped point by point, pixel by pixel, onto the plane of the camera. However, in its propagation from object to the camera, properties of light can be affected by what the light reflects off of. When it reflects off of a mirror, a clear image can be produced. But when it is reflected off of a shattered mirror, for example, the direction of light is altered and only a distorted version of the image can be seen.

Dogariu and his colleagues have found a way to describe how this measure of similarity between two points, called spatial coherence of light, transfers in a reflection from a diffuse wall. By learning how the light transforms, the researchers can determine where the light came from. Dogariu describes their findings as an aspect of light propagation that has simply been overlooked before. By undoing the effects of the diffusing wall, Dogariu and his colleagues have eliminated the need to control the light that illuminates the target object.

This is the first time that there has been a practical demonstration of passively detecting an object around a corner in this way.

The technique does not recover a complete image but collects more than enough information needed for task oriented surveillance.

“The potential of this technique goes beyond sensing,â€� says George Atia, a professor in EECS and member of a larger Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ team funded under Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Revolutionary Enhancement of Visibility by Exploiting Active Light-fields project that initiated this research. “Based on results of our recent simulations, we envision that non-line-of-sight, passive imaging of complex scenes could be achieved by data fusing that combines spatial coherence with additional intensity information.â€�

Until now, detection of objects around a corner has only been possible by emitting light toward the object and modifying some of its properties, say by sending a pulse of light, the light will bounce off the diffuse wall, onto the object, to the diffuse wall again, and back to the detector. The amount of time the light takes to return to the detector is then used to triangulate the position of the object. The problem with such methods is that the emission of light discloses the intent to see, which can be problematic in covert situations.

The new sensing method is not specific to light. It could be applied for example to infrared or microwaves radiation.

The other co-authors on the Nature Communication paper are Mahed Batarseh, Sergey Sukhov, Zhean Chen, Heath Gemar, Roxana Rezvani from Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½.

Scientists typically use spectrometry tools to study the way light interacts with a gas, liquid or solid. That method is described as “inelastic,� meaning the light’s energy is altered by its contact with matter.

A team led by Professor Aristide Dogariu of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s CREOL, The College of Optics & Photonics, has pioneered a way to detecting such interaction on a single layer of atoms – an exceedingly hard task because of the atom’s minute size – using a method that’s “elastic.â€� That means the light’s energy remains unchanged.

“Our experiment establishes that, even at atomic levels, a statistical optics-based measurement has practical capabilities unrivaled by conventional approaches,� Dogariu said.

As reported this month in Optica, the academic journal of The Optical Society, it’s the first demonstration of an elastic scattering, near-field experiment performed on a single layer of atoms.

The researchers demonstrate this novel and fundamental phenomenon using graphene, a two-dimensional, crystalline material. Their technique involved random illumination of the atomic monolayer from all possible directions and then analyzing how the statistical properties of the input light are influenced by miniscule defects in the atomic layer.

The method provided scientists not only with a simple and robust way to assess structural properties of 2D materials but also with new means for controlling the complex properties of optical radiation at subwavelength scales.

The team’s finding that its method is superior to conventional ones is of broad interest to the physics community. Beyond that, it could lead to other advances.

Graphene and other two-dimensional materials have properties that researchers are trying to leverage for use in display screens, batteries, capacitors, solar cells and more. But their effectiveness can be limited by impurities and finding those defects requires sophisticated microscopy techniques that are sometimes impractical. Dogariu’s research has yielded a more effective way of discovering those defects — a potentially valuable technique for industry.

The finding that a single layer of atoms modifies properties of light and other electromagnetic radiation has implications for controlling light at subwavelength scales in photonic devices such as LEDs and photovoltaic cells.

The research team also included Roxana Rezvani Naraghi of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Optics & Photonics and Department of Physics; Luiz Gustavo Cancado, of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Optics & Photonics and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil; and Felix Salazar-Bloise of Polytechnic University of Madrid in Spain.

The technology developed by Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ scientist Aristide Dogariu uses an optical fiber to beam light through a patient’s blood and interpret the signals that bounce back. Researchers believe that in some situations it could replace the need for doctors to wait while blood is drawn from a patient and tested.

“I absolutely see the technique having potential in the intensive care setting, where it can be part of saving the lives of critically ill patients with all kinds of other disorders,â€� said Dr. William DeCampli, who is chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and a professor at the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Medicine. DeCampli helped develop the technology and test it during surgery on infants.

During surgery, physicians are wary of the patient’s blood coagulating, or clotting, too quickly. A clot can lead to life-threatening conditions such as stroke or pulmonary embolism. Coagulation is of particular concern during cardiovascular surgery, when a clot can shut down the heart-lung machine used to circulate the patient’s blood.

Doctors administer blood-thinning medication to prevent coagulation. But every 20-30 minutes, blood must be withdrawn and taken to a lab for a test that can take up to 10 minutes. That’s a slow process with gaps of time without up-to-date information, especially in operations that can last four hours or more.

Dogariu, a Pegasus Professor in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Optics & Photonics, developed a machine with an optical fiber that can tap directly into the tubes of the heart-lung machine. The optical fiber beams light at the blood passing through the tube and detects the light as it bounces back.

As reported in a , the machine constantly interprets the light’s back-scatter to determine how rapidly red blood cells are vibrating. Slow vibration is a sign blood is coagulating and a blood-thinner may be needed.

The technology can alert doctors at the first sign of clotting, and provide nonstop information throughout a long procedure.

“It provides continuous feedback for the surgeon to make a decision on medication,� Dogariu said. “That is what’s new. Continuous, real-time monitoring is not available today. That is what our machine does, and in surgeries that can last for hours, this information can be critical.�

Doctoral student Jose Rafael Guzman-Sepulveda, who has studied real-time blood monitoring during surgery for the last year, helped to design the instrumentation and integrated it into the heart-lung machine.

“I needed to master not just the optical and signal processing instrumentation, but also the technology of the heart-lung machine, which I was able to do,� he said.

Over the past year, DeCampli tested the technology during cardiac surgeries on 10 infants at Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, which consistently ranks among the best centers in the nation for pediatric cardiac surgery and is the leading center in Orlando.

The successful tests were the end result of a relationship facilitated by Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½, DeCampli said. DeCampli, who has also been a professor of surgery at the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Medicine since its inception 10 years ago, noted that the university encourages interdisciplinary collaboration among its faculty as a way to spark innovative breakthroughs. That’s how he came to work with Dogariu, who has spent years researching the application of light-detection technology in industrial uses like the manufacture of semiconductors and paints.

“These things come about because of collaboration between a top-ranked engineering university and a top-ranked children’s hospital all in one city,� DeCampli said. “I think it’s the perfect way to make advances in medicine that are at the engineering frontiers.�

Their recently published paper is based on a small, proof-of-concept study. A larger study is in the works.

Aside from just carrying information – the most efficient transfer of information today is through optical fibers – light can also produce mechanical action. In the cover story for the current edition of Nature Photonics, the research team has shown that when the symmetry of scattered light is broken, the newly detected type of force appears and pushes sideways small particles floating on a surface.

This force is different from the usual push away from a source of light. A comet’s tail, for instance, points away from the sun because of the light’s pressure – whether the comet is approaching or has passed by.

The research, “Dynamic consequences of optical spin-orbit interaction,â€� has demonstrated that light forces do not necessarily push forward, adding to the team’s research two years ago that showed light can also pull small objects in a manner similar to a “tractor-beam,â€� said Aristide Dogariu, one of the team members and a Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ Pegasus professor of optics and photonics.

These unusual opto-mechanical effects provide new possibilities for efficient manipulation of microparticles, Dogariu said.

“Our work is fundamental. It establishes the physics of a new type of forces acting at interfaces,� he said. “The next step would be to implement this type of optical control for applications in drug delivery, chemical engineering of soft condensed matter, etcetera.�

Other authors on the study are research scientist Sergey Sukhov and Ph.D. student Veerachart Kajorndejnukul, also from CREOL (Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers) in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Optics and Photonics, and Ph.D. student Roxana Rezvani Naraghi from the Department of Physics.

The study was partially funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

The discoveries – each of them unrelated – will be presented at the 2015 TechConnect World Innovation Conference in Washington, D.C., from June 14-17. The annual event is designed to accelerate the commercialization of innovations out of the lab and into industry, and draws some of the brightest and most innovative researchers, funding agencies, national labs, international research organizations, universities, investors and corporate partners.

The Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ discoveries are among the top 20 percent of submittals selected to receive TechConnect Innovation Awards. The technologies include:

Another member of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ faculty, Jayan Thomas, will speak at the conference. Thomas, an assistant professor with the NanoScience Technology Center, the College of Optics and Photonics and the , was a finalist for a prestigious 2014 World Technology Network Award for his research on cables that can store and transmit energy.

“When you put people with different specialties and skills together, you never know what’s going to happen,� said Dr. Fernandez-Valle. “It’s a great opportunity to jump-start ideas.�

Dr. Fernandez-Valle’s research focus is on Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2), a disease that can leave children and young adults deaf, partially paralyzed or brain damaged. NF2 affects one in every 20,000 people, causing multiple tumors that, while benign, cause serious neurological problems. The disease attacks the body’s Schwann cells, which are cells in nerves in the body that form myelin sheaths around axons. Dr. Fernandez-Valle’s research is dedicated to understanding the cellular changes that make NF2 occur and targeting therapies that can prevent or slow tumor growth.

The team is developing novel photonic imaging techniques that allow them to observe how Schwann cells move on cylindrical axons. Imaging cells that move along curved surfaces is very difficult and therefore is poorly understood. All cells move during development, but if movement goes haywire, birth defects can occur and abnormal movement of cancer cells is part of the metastatic process by which cancers spread. By understanding Schwann cell movement, scientists hope to understand both how the Schwann cells form myelin and what happens when they acquire mutations and form tumors.

The partnership includes students at all levels who are learning their own lessons in collaborative thinking and interdisciplinary research. Dr. Fernandez-Valle’s students, Anthony Cole, a National Merit Scholar undergraduate, and Nicklaus Sparrow, a graduate student in Biomedical Sciences, work closely with Dr. Dogariu and his graduate students, Kyle Douglas and Colin Constant. A second-year M.D. student, William Trudo, was a Burnett School undergraduate and is doing his Focused Inquiry and Research Experience (FIRE) project with Dr. Fernandez-Valle on the optics and photonics project. He says working the collaboration has “pushed me out of my comfort zone. The use of light and lasers is outside what we generally learn in biology. Each of us has a different point of view and once you understand each other, you can move quickly.�

“I am a big picture person,� William said. “I’m always asking why.� By working with CREOL, he says, “the whole picture comes together.�

New discoveries are expected at the boundaries between traditional disciplines, a fact also realized by federal research agencies which are now increasingly looking to support more collaborative research projects. As Dr. Dogariu said, multidisciplinary projects like RIBOP “expand the range of what we can do through partnerships.�

But demonstrating the idea of using light to attract an object has long been an unattainable goal of scientists – until now.

A team of researchers from the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ and the National University of Singapore have shown that it is possible to pull microscopically small objects floating on a water surface in the opposite direction of the illuminating beam. Their study “Linear Momentum Increase and Negative Optical Forces at Dielectric Interfaceâ€� was published this past weekend on the website of Nature Photonics, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“Because this new way to generate optically induced action is simple to implement and robust, it opens new avenues in biophotonic sensing and optical manipulation,â€� said Aristide Dogariu, professor of optics in the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ College of Optics & Photonics. “For instance, these new types of forces can drive microflows without moving parts or any other additional mechanical or chemical preparations.â€�

In their research, the team discovered that forces acting against the flow of light can occur because of the natural amplification of momentum when light passes from one medium into another with a higher light-refractive index.

The pulling effect occurs, for example, when light travels from air into water. The scattering of the light causes “momentum conservation� resulting in the negative force that pulls the object backwards.

“This is an experimental demonstration of a new concept to achieve so-called ‘tractor beams.’ Particles can move indefinitely without having to continuously modify the light beam,� Dogariu said.

Common to many living systems, the environment and chemically engineered products, complex interfaces are created when active molecules or particles collect at the boundaries. “The flexibility of applying spatially distributed optical forces could lead to new means for macroscopic manipulation of such structures,� Dogariu said. The concept may be developed to use in medical, chemical and other fields to move or separate small targeted items (such as bacteria or other biological entities) because of the different ways they would scatter the light.

The team also included Dr. Sergey Sukhov, a senior research scientist in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Optics & Photonics, Veerachart Kajorndejnukul a Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ graduate student, and two scientists from National University of Singapore, Weiqiang Ding and Cheng-Wei Qiu. 

The research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The research, published recently in Nature Photonics, shows that suspensions of tiny objects are affected by both thermal fluctuations and additional energy that can be controlled by light, thereby creating an artificial “active medium” that allows scientists to better understand its mechanical properties.

“Living systems are typical examples of ‘active matter’ as opposed to passive matter, like common solids or liquids,� said Aristide Dogariu, a professor of optics. “Active media have unique properties that can be traced back to their constituents’ ability to convert additional energy, stored or imparted from the environment, into cooperative motion.�

Dogariu was joined in the research by Kyle Douglass, a graduate student, and by Sergey Sukhov, a research scientist at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½â€™s College of Optics and Photonics. Their work demonstrates a colloidal model for active media, where varying the amount of light controls the macroscopic properties and provides means for exploring the intricate manifestations of active matter.

Dogariu said there has been significant theoretical work during the past decade but understanding the complicated mechanics of active matter in biological systems is still unsatisfactory because of the lack of controlled experiments.

Eventually, such research “may also open avenues for creating synthetic materials that could mimic properties of living matter,� he said.

The next step of the research, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, will be for the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ã½ team to use their model to understand some of the statistical properties of this new kind of light-matter interaction and apply them for controlling mechanical aspects of cellular processes.