The ability to measure the mechanical properties of biological tissues, cells and biomaterials in vivo would have a significant impact in many areas of biological research and clinical medicine.  However, current instruments to assess material mechanics require contact or are limited to the analysis of few points at set locations. Brillouin light scattering is an intriguing solution to this gap as it allows to read out mechanical information optically via the spectral analysis of the scattered light.  In the past years, we have developed Brillouin spectroscopy technology, where label-free contrast is provided by the material elastic modulus, viscosity and density. Our first area of application has been in ophthalmology as the loss of corneal strength leads to ectasia and is a major risk factor for refractive surgery complications. In this space, we have developed an in vivo Brillouin ophthalmoscope and showed Brillouin microscopy outperforms any existing technology in differentiating ectatic corneas. Then, we improved the imaging resolution to analyze cell mechanical properties and we are investigating the metastatic cascade, where several rate-limiting processes are known to be mechanical in nature. Recently, we have been researching novel solutions to dramatically speed up the image acquisition employing nonlinear optical interactions and atomic spectroscopy.

Giuliano Scarcelli is a professor at the University of Maryland in the Bioengineering department and the Biophysics program, as well as the director of the St. John's Center for Translational Engineering and Medicine. Giuliano obtained his PhD in quantum optics with a EU-funded graduate fellowship between the University of Bari, Italy and UMBC, USA. Giuliano then was at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine of Harvard Medical School for eight years, first as a postdoc in Prof. Yun's Lab, then as an instructor and assistant professor. He joined the University of Maryland in 2015. Giuliano has been the recipient of several awards such as the “Exceptional by example” award for outstanding PhD studies, the Tosteson Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard, the Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER award and “Teaching excellence” awards from both Harvard University and University of Maryland.