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Meet the Researcher


Dr. James Chan
Dr. James Chan is a Staff Scientist in the Physics Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, CA. In addition, he is a staff researcher at the NSF Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology (CBST) at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, CA. His research interest broadly encompasses the development of label-free spectroscopic and microscopic techniques for biomedical, biosensing, and chemical sensing applictions. Techniques of interest include vibrational spectroscopy (Raman, surface enhanced Raman, coherent anti-Stokes Raman,infrared) and second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy.
Dr. Matthew Coleman
Dr. Matthew Coleman is currently an Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Davis in the Department of Radiation Oncology and a member of the NIH Cancer Center within the medical center. Dr. Coleman also holds a scientific appointment as a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.
Dr. Christopher Contag
Dr. Christopher Contag is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics – Neonatology, of Microbiology & Immunology and, by courtesy, of Radiology at Stanford University. He currently serves in the roles of Co-Director of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS, http://mips.stanford.edu/public/about.adp), Director of the Stanford Center for Innovation in In-Vivo Imaging (SCI3, http://mips.stanford.edu/public/sci3.adp), and Director of the Stanford Near Infrared Optics and Photomedicine Center. He is a member of the Stanford BioX faculty (http://biox.stanford.edu/), the immunology Program and the Stanford Cancer Center (http://cancer.stanford.edu/). His area of study focuses on understanding both the mechanisms of disease (cancer, infection and genetic diseases), and the complex genetic programs of mammalian development and stem cell biology.
Dr. Stavros Demos
Dr. Stavros Demos is currently a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA within the Condensed Matter and Materials Division. Dr. Demos also holds the position as a Professional Researcher at the Department of Urology, University of California, Davis. His training is in Physics where he received his B.S. from the University of Ioannina, Greece and his Ph.D. from the City University of New York.
Dr. Gene G. Gurkoff
Dr. Gene Gurkoff is post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, CA and a CBST Member. His research interest focuses on traumatic brain injury. Over 1.7 million people annually suffer a traumatic brain injury. This results in over 50,000 deaths and over 275,000 hospitalizations. Many individuals suffer from long-term disabilities following their injuries. Dr. Gurkoff is part of a translational research team including neuroscientists and neurosurgeons who are trying to develop and implement novel therapies that will improve the quality of life for people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury.
Dr. Paul T. Henderson
Dr. Paul T. Henderson is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine / Hematology & Oncology Division at the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, CA and a CBST Member. His research interest focuses on the use of accelerator mass spectrometry to measure small amounts of drugs bound to DNA (DNA adducts), which provides a measure of the cells' propensity to take up the drug, form, and repair DNA damage. These characteristics vary greatly in tumor cells, and Dr. Henderson's laboratory is interested in compiling such information as a means to predict which cancer patients respond to chemotherapy. Research in the Henderson laboratory also focuses on utilization of cell-free protein expression to make nanolipoprotein particles (NLPs), which can be "coexpressed" with membrane proteins such as GPCRs and ERRB2 (HER2).
Dr. Thomas Huser
Dr. Thomas Huser is an Associate Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of California, Davis. He also serves as Chief Scientist for CBST and Co-Director for the Translational Core of the Clinical Translational Science Center at UC Davis. Until November 2005, he was a Group leader for Biophotonics and Nanospectroscopy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, CA, where he developed and applied novel nano-biophotonics tools for characterizing the nano-systems biology of individual cells. He joined LLNL in 1998 as a postdoctoral researcher and became a staff scientist in 2000. Dr. Huser obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Basel, Switzerland, where he worked primarily on near-field optical microscopy. At UC Davis he applies single molecule fluorescence, Nano-Biophotonics, and Raman spectroscopy and imaging to biological and medical problems at the single cell level.
Dr. Clark Lagarias
Dr. Clark Lagarias is a Professor of Biochemistry in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. His laboratory studies phytochromes, which are biliprotein switchable photosensors. The following are three projects within Dr. Lagarias's laboratory: (1) Molecular Mechanisms of Phytochrome Signaling, (2) Molecular and Structural Biology of Phycocyanobilin:Ferredoxin Oxidoreductases, and (3) Phytochrome Engineering: A Versatile Class of Red and Near Infrared Fluorescent Protein Probes.
Dr. Kit Lam
Dr. Kit Lam was born in Hong Kong, obtained his B.A. in Microbiology in 1975 at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received a Robert A Welch Undergraduate Research Fellowship in 1974-75. He obtained his Ph.D. in Oncology in 1980 from McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, University of Wisconsin, and his M.D. in 1984 from Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his Internal Medicine residency training and Medical Oncology Fellowship training at the University of Arizona. He is board certified in both Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. He was on the faculty of the University of Arizona until June 1999, when he joined UC Davis School of Medicine as the Division Chief of Hematology/Oncology, a position he continues to hold today.
Dr. Laura Marcu
Dr. Laura Marcu is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Davis. In addition, she holds a joint appointment in UC Davis School of Medicine as a Professor of Neurological Surgery and serves as co-Leader of the Biotechnology Program within the UC Davis Cancer Center. Her area of study concerns research into the development of fluorescence lifetime spectroscopy and imaging techniques for in-vivo tissue diagnosis.
Dr. Kelly Nash
Dr. Kelly Nash is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Dr. Nash received her B.S. in Physics from Dillard University, New Orleans, LA and her M.S. in Applied Physics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. She attended the University of Texas San Antonio where she received her Ph.D. in Physics in 2009. During her graduate studies she broadened her physics knowledge to include a more interdisciplinary approach, which included expanding her studies to include chemistry and biology.
Dr. John Spence
Dr. John Spence is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University. His areas of study include "condensed matter physics and biophysics, based around the use of electron and X-ray beams for imaging, spectroscopy and diffraction - broadly diffraction physics".
Dr. Susan Spiller
Dr. Susan Spiller is an Associate Professor of Biology at Mills College, a small undergraduate Women's College in Oakland, California. Her area of study includes Biophotonics Research into phytochromes which are classified as photosensitive proteins that were first discovered in plants, but exist in a myriad of organisms from fungi to cyanobacteria.
Dr. Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu
Dr. Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at the University of California, Davis. In addition, he holds a joint appointment as the Facilities Director of the National Science Foundation Center for Biophotonics Science & Technology at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, CA. His research interests include time-resolved Raman spectroscopy/imaging, nonlinear microscopy, and SERS-based biosensors.