Robert Alfano

Robert R. Alfano ( born May 5, 1941 in New York City ) is an American physicist who deals specifically with lasers and their application in medicine and ultrafast laser spectroscopy.

Alfano studied at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey with a bachelor 's degree in 1963 and a master's degree in 1964 and was then employed from 1964 to 1972 in the research laboratories of the telecommunications company GTE Corporation, where he conducted research on lasers. He received his doctorate at New York University ( over the lifetime of optical phonons) in 1972.

In 1972 he was Assistant Professor, Associate Professor in 1974 and 1978, Professor of Physics at the City College of New York. Since 1983 he is there Herbert Kayser Professor in the Department of Electrical and since 1987 Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Physics. Since 1982 he is Director of the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers, which he founded with.

It deals with, among other things, laser development, ultrafast spectroscopy ( with Pico - and femtosecond pulses), biomedical imaging techniques ( such as optical mammography and tomography ), optical physics, light propagation in disordered media (like the majority of biological tissues ), semiconductors, nanotechnology, coherent backscattering and the use of lasers in medicine ( for example, optical biopsy for cancer diagnosis using various spectroscopic techniques ) and biology.

Alfano was from the early 1970s, a pioneer in supercontinuum laser light sources with optically nonlinear materials. He developed for applications in medicine, the White Light Supercontinuum Laser and he developed tunable solid-state laser with chromium as the active medium ( chrome laser ) which were marketed under the name forsterite, Emerald and Cunyite.

In the optical biopsy his group in 1984 was the first cancer diagnosis with fluorescence spectroscopy without the use of fabric dyes by foreign led and 1991, the first that began Raman spectroscopy for breast cancer diagnosis. In 1981, he developed a fluorescence spectroscopic method to find cavities in teeth.

He has published over 700 scientific papers and holds over 100 patents ( as of 2009). At the City College of New York, he had more than 50 PhD students (as of 2009 ).

In 2008 he received the Charles Hard Townes Award and the 2013 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser - Physics. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the IEEE and the American Physical Society. In 1975 he was Sloan Fellow.