Roberto Paiella
Boston University, MA·Engineering
Ordinary camera sensors record only how bright light is. Light also carries other information: its direction of travel, which depends on its phase, and its polarization, the direction in which it vibrates.
- Fields
Engineering
Physics
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
metasurfaces
nanophotonics
image sensors
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Sep 2029
What they work on
- Design and fabricate dielectric metasurfaces on commercial CMOS sensor arrays to build a phase-imaging meta-sensor (PIMS) array that reconstructs optical phase quantitatively in a single shot.
- Demonstrate a phase- and polarization-imaging meta-sensor (P2IMS) array that adds full-Stokes polarimetry (complete polarization measurement), with computational reconstruction combining phase imaging and polarimetry.
- Build a miniaturized PIMS microscope with green-LED metasurfaces and test it on scattering phantoms and chick embryo blood vessels, aiming for clinically accurate white blood cell counts for noninvasive capillaroscopy.
- Probe non-Hermitian topological modes in light-absorbing silicon photonic crystal slabs using wavelength-, angle- and polarization-resolved photocurrent measurements, testing effects such as the non-Hermitian skin effect.
- Exploit topological effects to create compact photodetectors with complex angle and color responses, demonstrating triangulation and ranging, multispectral imaging and wavefront sensing.
More about the research
Measuring these usually requires bulky, complex equipment. Roberto Paiella's research builds tiny engineered structures directly onto silicon light sensors so that each pixel can read this hidden information. The goal is compact cameras for microscopy, medical diagnosis, machine vision and navigation. The projects range from fundamental optical physics to a blood-imaging microscope.
Why it matters
Noninvasive imaging of blood cells in the mouth could extend blood testing to immunocompromised patients and resource-limited settings where drawing blood is impractical. It could also speed treatment decisions and add dynamic diagnostic information. Compact phase and polarization sensors could also aid biomedical microscopy, endoscopy for cancer surgery, remote sensing and autonomous navigation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Aydogan Ozcan
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Design diffractive optical networks, stacks of deep-learning-optimized, sub-wavelength-patterned layers, that undo skin scattering and absorption to reconstruct images of objects beneath tissue in near-infrared light.
Rosario Porras-Aguilar
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Engineering·Early-career
Build a mathematical framework for wavefront shaping, the control of light's phase front, that selectively enhances the spatial frequencies carrying information about a feature's size, shape, and orientation while suppressing background from small-angle scatter.
Avik Dutt
University of Maryland, MD·Engineering·Early-career
Design and fabricate passive synthetic-dimension platforms from the transverse spatial modes of multimode waveguides, using mode converters to engineer desired couplings and realize topological Hamiltonians on low-loss photonic integrated circuits.
The school
Boston University: 26 labs on PI Pages, $784M a year on research, 630 research doctorates a year.
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