Understanding and Exploiting Biological Response
Over the past two decades, my research has evolved from developing technologies for diagnosis and treatment towards a broader scientific challenge.
Early in my career, I was primarily interested in improving interventions. Over time, I became increasingly intrigued by something else: the large differences in how individuals respond to those interventions.
This observation gradually connected many seemingly different research topics, including hyperthermia, medical imaging, computational medicine, neuromodulation and biomedical electromagnetics.
Today, these activities are united by a common goal: understanding, predicting and ultimately exploiting biological response.
Why do similar individuals respond differently to the same intervention?
Patients with seemingly similar characteristics can respond very differently to diagnosis, therapy and rehabilitation.
Understanding, predicting and ultimately influencing this variability remains one of the major challenges in medicine.
Reliable measurements provide the foundation for understanding biological systems in health and disease. Our work develops technologies that enable quantitative observation of anatomy, physiology and treatment response.
Computational models help integrate observations, infer hidden system properties and predict outcomes. Rather than modelling everything, we seek models that capture what matters most.
Real-world implementation is not only a pathway to impact. Clinical deployment creates opportunities to test scientific ideas, reveal limitations and generate entirely new research questions.
Progress depends on interactions between academic, clinical, industrial and societal ecosystems. These ecosystems accelerate impact while creating opportunities for new scientific discovery.
One idea that increasingly shaped my research is what I call Therapy as Experiment.
I began to realize that interventions are not only opportunities to improve patient outcomes, but also opportunities to learn about biology itself. Every treatment perturbs the system. By measuring and modelling the resulting response, therapies can simultaneously benefit patients and advance scientific understanding.
The same idea applies to care delivery itself: implementing a technology in practice is also an experiment. See Implementation & Innovation.
Understanding and improving response to thermal therapies.
Studying how targeted interventions influence neural activity.
Quantitative observation of biological structure, function and response.
Patient-specific models supporting prediction and decision making.
Key questions currently guiding this research include: