I performed research and taught at university Master's level about the interaction of light with tissue. Light is sensitive to changes in tissues that occur in the earliest stages of disease development. Correctly interpreting these optical fingerprints, and representing them as valuable diagnostic information, is a tremendously complicated (but very interesting!) task that requires the collaboration between clinicians, engineers and physicists like myself. From my home turf of Optical Coherence Tomography, we made tremendous progress in the engineering (working towards solutions based on integrated optics) and clinical implementation of OCT. Next to that, together with my PhD students, I worked hard on the development of techniques such as Single Fiber Reflectance spectroscopy. I developed, coordinated and taught the Master's courses Biomedical Optics and Light Tissue Interaction.

In 2006 I received a NWO VENI grant (research incentives scheme) to develop novel contrast mechanisms for Optical Coherence Tomography, for taking the technique 'beyond taking images alone'. Functional Optical Biopsy is the micro-scale 3D imaging of cancer, it's structure & physiology using techniques such as Optical Coherence Tomography and Single Fiber Reflectance spectroscopy.