Visible Light

Hi, my name is Rohit Bhargava. I'm a professor of bioengineering and a full-time member of the Beckman Institute. I'm also the director of the university's Cancer Center. My lab is interested in developing a technology we call 'chemical imaging.' We're all familiar with visible imaging or, as we call it, imaging with visible light; we're able to see the color and shape of objects with visible light. But we're not able to see what's inside them. We're not able to see the chemistry that might be present in an object. With chemical imaging, we're able to look at an object and not only see its shape and size, we're also able to see what the molecular composition of that object is. So we can understand what makes things work and, perhaps, why they're failing because of a change in their molecular composition. My lab develops the instruments and the computer programs that allow us to measure and make sense of the molecular composition. We use this, in particular, to look at cancers. We want to understand how cancers grow, especially with respect to the contribution of the tumor microenvironment to them.