Dr. Kamran Avanaki

Kamran Avanaki is currently an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Prior to this position, he was an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Department at Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Kent, United Kingdom with an Outstanding Achievement Honor in Medical Optical Imaging and Computing in 2012. His areas of expertise are design and development of photoacoustic imaging technology and optical coherence tomography for biomedical applications to solve critical problems in brain and skin imaging. As principle investigator, he has received multiple research grants/ fellowships including NIH R01 Bioengineering Research Grants (BRG), NIH R01 BRAIN Initiative: Proof of Concept Development of Early Stage Next Generation Human Brain Imaging, and Melanoma Research Alliance Grant. He has received several other awards. He has published in numerous high-level journals such as, PNAS, Cancer Research, IEEE Transaction of Biomedical Imaging, Photoacoustics, Journal of Biomedical Optics, Optics Letters, Applied Optics, and IEEE Journals including more than 80 first authored/ senior authored peer-reviewed articles. His Google Scholar citation is over 2000 with an h-index of 23. In addition to serving on the technical program committees for SPIE PW, IEEE ICIP, ICACCI and MICCAI conferences, he has delivered 46 keynotes, plenary, or invited talks, and presented papers at several conferences across the globe. He is an associate editor of Applied Optics Journal and Frontiers in Neuroscience. He has mentored /co-mentored more than 30 graduate students and has been awarded the Outstanding Faculty Award three times (in 2016, 2017, and 2019) at Wayne State University. He also received the Research Excellence Award and Excellence in Teaching Award in 2019 from the Engineering School at Wayne State University.