Im Juli 2015 habe ich an einem EuroTech PostDoc Workshop an der EPFL teilgenommen. Eines der Themen war „Selling your Science“. Ich habe dafür zuvor einen kleinen Vortrag vorbereitet darüber, was ich an der DTU so treibe. Im Verlaufe des Workshops konnte ich den Vortrag noch anpassen, und am Ende wurde er aufgezeichnet. Hier ist das Video und das original-Manuskript.

I’m Dominik.

I’m working at the technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen, where I’m doing “Biophotonics”, which is, amongst other things, using light to diagnose and treat severe diseases, such as cancer or circulatory disorders.

Basically, I want to cure you by just looking at you.

On one hand, light is very well suited to this task, since it is normally not harmful to humans.

On the other hand, however, humans are not very transparent to light, and you need a lot of tricks to see inside or even through a human body.

I’m not going to bore you today with all the beautiful techniques people have come up with, but I am going to give you a glimpse at one of them, the one that is at the very bottom of them all: it is using light of high quality. Luckily, Theodore Maiman invented a source delivering such light more than half a century ago: the laser.

Today, it’s development is far from done. Since light is so fundamental to all aspects of Biophotonics, my group at the technical University of Denmark is working towards higher quality laser light sources, that have the additional benefit of being more compact and cheaper than their predecessors, and of being easier to operate.

Already now, we could show that, using our newly developed light sources, we can get a clearer view of the inside of a human body, basically by just looking at it from outside.

Your highest risk of death is from a circulatory disorder or from cancer. These two are also weighing most heavily on our society’s health costs.

My vision and responsibility as a researcher is that our light source, when used in Biophotonics, will lead to an earlier diagnosis and higher chances of curing these life-threatening diseases, to the benefit of our whole society.

Thank you very much.