Professor T. J.
Manuccia
Biographical Sketch
I have conducted physics, chemistry and engineering research since 1969. I have led R&D teams in these areas continuously since 1980 and have been in a position to evaluate new technologies through my service on numerous review and patent committees since the early 1980s.
Until around 1990, my interests were primarily in the development of new lasers and various spectroscopic and chemical applications of lasers. This included using lasers for selectively induced chemistry (including laser isotope separation), as well as two new forms of laser microscopy, the CARS (Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman) microscope and the LEM (Laser Electron Microscope). My work in optics relied on a strong background in high resolution molecular spectroscopy, chemical kinetics and mathematical modeling and analysis.
In the early ‘90’s, I was invited to speak at several neuroscience meetings, and I began to collaborate with other investigators in both theoretical and experimental neuroscience problems. In the following years, this led to my research groups at Physical Sciences, Inc. and Schafer Corporation turning extensively to neuroscience, and developing novel optically controlled small-signal analog multiplexers which would allow microelectrode arrays to interface with extremely large networks of neurons. In this area of bio-opto-microelectronics, we made several major breakthroughs, increasing the number of electrodes in these arrays by two orders of magnitude, and thereby opening up the possibility of high throughput functional assays based on extracellular stimulation and recording. Such assays will likely have important uses in drug discovery (“screen-in”), toxicology (“screen-out”) and the basic neurosciences. My groups at PSI and Schafer have also been heavily involved in (a) developing mathematical tools to simulate large networks of neurons; (b) developing novel data analysis algorithms to analyze the masses of experimental neuron firing data becoming available from microelectrode arrays.
In June 2004, I joined the faculty at