Prof. Angela Belcher leads research focused on understanding and harnessing nature’s own processes in order to design technologically important materials and devices for energy, the environment, and medicine. Prof. Belcher will introduce her efforts to develop novel probes for near-infrared imaging, which have produced promising data for imaging tumors in both ovarian and brain cancer for detection of 1/2 millimeter-sized tumors, as well as ovarian cancer animal studies showing a 40% increase in median survival using this new technology. The Belcher Lab has also developed a new optical imaging system to facilitate non-invasive, in vivo cellular-level imaging of whole mice and rats, with a demonstrated depth of 6 centimeters in muscle tissue.