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Professor David Sampson
+61 8 6488 7112
david.sampson@uwa.edu.au
University of Western Australia
Head, Optical+Biomedical Engineering Laboratory
Professor, School of Electrical, Electronic & Computer Engineering
Director, State Government Centre of Excellence in eMedicine
Director, Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation & Analysis (CMCA)
Director, Nanoscale Characterisation Centre (WA) State Government Centre of Excellence
Director, WA Node of the Australian Microscopy & Microanalysis Research Facility
Director, UWA Bioimaging Initiative
Profile
Professor Sampson is Director of the Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation & Analysis (CMCA), a core facility of the University of Western Australia, and heads the Optical+Biomedical Engineering Laboratory (OBEL) in the School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering. He directs the Western Australian node of the Australian Microscopy and Microanalysis Research Facility (AMMRF), the Western Australian State Government's Nanoscale Characterisation Centre and the Centre for eMedicine. He leads the University's Bioimaging Initiative aimed at increasing the uptake and quality of microscopic imaging and related technologies in medicine and the life sciences.
Professor Sampson has over fifteen years research experience in the fields of optics, photonics, and microscopy, and applications in communications, sensors, and biomedicine. More on his research profile can be found here.
Prof. Sampson has formed strong collaborations with biological and medical researchers and clinicians. He is a strong promoter of the importance of interdisciplinary engagement as the basis for a stimulating and productive intellectual environment. Prof. Sampson has attracted research funding in excess of $27M. He has published in excess of 75 journal articles attracting in excess of 830 citations, as indexed in the Web of Science, at an average citation rate of 11.7 per paper and an h-index of 18. He has been invited to speak at more than 20 conferences in the last five years. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE Photonics Journal and has previous editorial experience with the Optical Society of America journal Applied Optics (1999-2005). He is currently on the editorial board of Opticalfibersensors.org and the Australian Optical Society News. He is an elected member of the Australian Optical Society Council. He has been involved in the running of more than 20 conferences. Highlights include representing the Asia Pacific for the Optical Fiber Communications conference (1996-1998), serving as Technical Programme Chair for the Asia Pacific Communications conference (1997), co-chairing Focus on Microscopy (2006), and chairing the International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors in 2008.
Academic Qualifications
| 1992 | Doctor of Philosophy (Physics), University of Kent, United Kingdom |
| 1981 | Bachelor of Science (Chemical Physics) with First Class Honours, University of Western Australia |
Relevant Employment History
| 2005 - 2007 | Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Engineering Computing & Mathematics |
| 1996 - 2002 | Associate Professor, Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of Western Australia |
| 1996 | Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of Western Australia |
| 1995 - 1996 | Deputy Director, Photonics Research Laboratory, Australian Photonics Cooperative Research Centre, Melbourne, Australia |
| 1993 - 1996 | Senior Research Fellow, Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne, Australia |
| 1989 - 1993 | Research Fellow, Lecturer, Physics Laboratory, University of Kent, United Kingdom |
| 1987 - 1988 | Development Physicist, Australian Optical Fibre Research Pty. Ltd., Australia |
| 1985 - 1986 | Research Officer, Physics Department, University of Western Australia |
| 1982 - 1984 | Senior Field Engineer, Schlumberger Offshore Ltd., The Netherlands and Italy |
His early research in optical communications centred on the technique of photonic code-division multiple access (CDMA). He continues to be well cited for his contributions, which include the invention of several schemes based on broadband light, practical demonstrations, and the understanding of fundamental limits of the optical version of this widely used communications technique. He has also made contributions to wavelength-division multiplexing transmission and networking, through his studies of schemes based on spectrally slicing broadband light. His early demonstration of the modification of the gain spectrum of an optical amplifier through cascaded sections of differently doped fibres predated an explosion of work on gain flattening in optical amplifiers.
At UWA, Prof. Sampson's interests switched to the field of biomedical optical engineering, with an emphasis on imaging and microscopy. His group, the Optical+Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, is involved in activities ranging from the invention and investigation of new optical techniques to the engineering of these techniques into practical instruments for application in biology or medicine. A major emphasis of his research is the coherent imaging modality optical coherence tomography, which continues the theme, begun in his communications research, of exploitation of the coherence properties of broadband light sources. His interest in coherent imaging has extended over recent years to holography. He is also interested in tissue optics and diffuse light propagation in tissue.
Outcomes in optical coherence tomography (OCT) span theory, technology and applications. Theoretical contributions include the determination of limits on resolution set by absorption and dispersion in tissue, and an understanding of OCT speckle and mulitple scattering. Technology outcomes include a number of aspects of frequency-domain optical delay line technology, such as demonstrations of ultra-long scanning, variable and dynamic dispersion compensation, and achromatic phase shifting. More recently, this includes development of elastography, to measure the elastic contrast in tissues, and OCT needle technology for probing solid tissues interstitially. OBEL has pioneered the development of anatomical OCT, the use of OCT in lumen size and shape measurement. Anatomical OCT has enabled the first quantitative long-term bedside observations of the human upper airway during sleep. Anatomical OCT has also demonstrated in the lower airway, for example, in aiding stent selection in stenoses. Studies of the potential of OCT in in situ lymph node characterization and characterization of scars and skin are ongoing.
His interest in skin proceeds from earlier research on skin cancer diagnosis via low-cost means based on diffuse reflectance spectroscopy to differentiate between malignant melanoma and benign naevi (moles) in vivo. His recent interest in holography has focused on wide-field Fourier holographic microscopy techniques; characterising microstructure in biological samples without directly resolving it, making it possible to quantify large sample areas in a single image or synthesizing high-resolution images from multiple Fourier holograms.
