Robert Alfano
Robert R. Alfano (born May 5, 1941 in New York City ) is an American physicist who deals in particular with lasers and their application in medicine, as well as with ultra-fast laser spectroscopy.
Alfano graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey with a bachelor's degree in 1963 and a master's degree in 1964 and then worked in the research laboratories of the telecommunications company GTE Corporation from 1964 to 1972 , where he researched lasers. In 1972 he received his PhD from New York University (on the lifespan of optical phonons).
He became Assistant Professor in 1972 , Associate Professor in 1974 and Professor of Physics at City College of New York in 1978 . Since 1983 he has been the Herbert Kayser Professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and since 1987 Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering in the Faculties of Electrical Engineering and Physics. Since 1982 he has been director of the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers , which he co-founded.
Among other things, he deals with laser development, ultrafast spectroscopy (with picosecond and femtosecond pulses), biomedical imaging methods (such as optical mammography and tomography), optical physics, light propagation in disordered media (such as the majority of biological tissues), semiconductors, nanotechnology, coherent backscattering and the use of lasers in medicine (e.g. optical biopsy for cancer diagnosis using various spectroscopic techniques) and biology.
Alfano was a pioneer in supercontinuum laser light sources with optically non-linear materials from the early 1970s . He developed the White Light Supercontinuum Laser for applications in medicine and he developed tunable solid-state lasers with chromium as the active medium (chromium laser), which were marketed under the names Fosterit, Emerald and Cunyite.
In the optical biopsy, his group was the first in 1984 to carry out cancer diagnostics with fluorescence spectroscopy without the use of non-tissue dyes and in 1991 the first to use Raman spectroscopy for breast cancer diagnosis. In 1981 he developed a fluorescence spectroscopy method to find cavities in teeth.
He has published over 700 scientific papers and holds over 100 patents (as of 2009). At the City College of New York he had over 50 doctoral students (as of 2009).
In 2008 he received the Charles Hard Townes Award and in 2013 the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Physics . He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America , the IEEE, and the American Physical Society . In 1975 he was a Sloan Research Fellow .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dates of birth according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Alfano, Robert |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Alfano, Robert R. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American physicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 5, 1941 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York City |