BME Seminar: Elizabeth Hillman
Monday, March 28, 2022, 12:00 p.m.
Elizabeth Hillman
Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology (Physics)
Columbia University
“High-speed Optical Imaging and Microscopy for Scientific Discovery and Human Health"
Keating 103
Live Zoom | Passcode: BearDown
(Instructor permission required for enrolled students to attend via Zoom)
Hosts: Dr. Beth Hutchinson and Dr. Russ Witte
Persons with a disability may request a reasonable accommodation by contacting the Disability Resource Center at 621-3268 (V/TTY).
ABSTRACT
The Hillman Lab specializes in the development and application of optical imaging and microscopy methods to investigate physiology and function in living tissues, particularly the living brain. Building on early work in diffuse optical tomography and small animal molecular imaging, our current technologies leverage genetically encoded fluorescent calcium indicators to measure real-time neuronal activity in the brains of a range of awake, behaving animals. Our wide-field optical mapping (WFOM) technique captures interlaced fluorescence and diffuse reflectance measurements of the entire dorsal cortex of awake, behaving mice through thinned skull, permitting analysis of both blood oxygenation dynamics and neuronal activity to study so-called neurovascular coupling. Simultaneous tracking of the mouse’s behavior permits modeling and analysis of the neural basis of movement control and how perturbations such as drugs and disease change the relationship between brain activity and behavior. We also recently developed a high-speed 3D imaging method called swept confocally aligned planar excitation (SCAPE) microscopy which can image 3D neuronal activity in the mouse cortex at cellular resolution and video rate, and can image the entire brain of smaller organisms such as zebrafish larvae, fruit flies and freely moving C. elegans worms. SCAPE is based on single-objective oblique light sheet illumination and can capture 3D images at up to 300 volumes per second with high signal to noise and minimal photobleaching. We have applied SCAPE to diverse studies of neural physiology while also developing numerous embodiments of the technique for broader applications. Most recently we have demonstrated MediSCAPE, which is able to capture high-speed 3D images of in-situ, human tissues for real-time in-vivo histopathology. We are also developing a related high-throughput, high-content single objective light sheet techniques for scanning very large, cleared tissues which we are applying to imaging the entire immunostained human brain.
BIO
Elizabeth Hillman is a Herbert and Florence Irving Professor at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behaviour Institute and a professor in the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology. Dr. Hillman obtained her undergraduate degree in Physics, and Ph.D. in Medical Physics and Bioengineering at University College London. After her Ph.D., Dr Hillman joined a medical devices start-up company in Boston MA, and subsequently completed post-doctoral research and became junior faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She moved to Columbia University as an Assistant Professor in 2006.
Bringing her engineering and physics expertise to biomedical questions, Elizabeth Hillman has developed a wide range of multi-scale in-vivo imaging methods including SCAPE microscopy for high-speed 3D imaging. She has also developed a range of techniques for the dynamic analysis of high-speed imaging data. She uses these methods to study whole-brain neural dynamics in a range of model organisms and has also made contributions to understanding the cellular mechanisms that regulate blood flow in the brain. She is dedicated to developing and leveraging novel imaging tools to drive advances in our understanding of disease and to improve human health. Her teaching has focused on Biomedical Engineering Design, advanced microscopy and biomedical imaging.
Hillman is a fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA, now Optica), the society of photo-optical instrumentation (SPIE) and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). She received the 2011 OSA Adolf Lomb Medal for contributions to optics at a young age, the 2018 SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award, a 2020 Royal Microscopical Society Mid-Career Scientific Achievement Award and early career awards from the Wallace Coulter Foundation, National Science Foundation and Human Frontier Science Progra