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Adela Ben-Yakar, Ph.D. Bio

Contact Information

Mechanical Engineering Department

Biomedical Engineering Department

Office: ETC 7.132
Phone: 512.475.9280
Fax: 512.471.1045
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Address:
The University of Texas at Austin
Mechanical Engineering Department
1 University Station C2200
Austin, TX 78712-0292

ben-yakar

Dr. Adela Ben-Yakar
Professor
, Mechanical Engineering Department
The University of Texas at Austin

Adela Ben-Yakar | Women in Optics | 2013 SPIE

2015 OSA Fellow

Education

12/2000 Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University
02/1995 M.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology
02/1992 B.Sc. (Cum Laude) in Aerospace Engineering, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology

 

Professional Experience

2016 - Present Professor

Mechanical Engineering Department, The University of Texas at Austin

Biomedical Engineering Department, The University of Texas at Austin

2015 - 2016 Associate Professor Biomedical Engineering Department, The University of Texas at Austin
2010 - 2016 Associate Professor Mechanical Engineering Department, The University of Texas at Austin
2004 - 2010 Assistant Professor Mechanical Engineering Department, The University of Texas at Austin
2009 - Present Faculty Fellow Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology (ICMB), The University of Texas at Austin
2005 - Present Graduate Student Council Member Biomedical Engineering Department, The University of Texas at Austin
2005 - Present Faculty Fellow Institute for Neuroscience, The University of Texas at Austin
02/2002 -06/2002 Visiting Scientist Visiting Postdoc in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University with Eric Mazur
09/2000 - 09/2004 Postdoctoral Research Fellow Applied Physics Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA with Robert L. Byer
09/1995 - 09/2000 Graduate Research Assistant Mechanical Engineering Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA with Ronald K. Hanson
02/1992 - 05/1995 Graduate Research/Teaching Assistant Aerospace Engineering Department, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, with Alon Gany and Beny Natan

 

Honors and Awards   

  • Senior Member of the SPIE elected (2016). SPIE – The International Society for Optical Engineering.

  • Plenary Speaker at the opening session of ICALEO - the International Congress on Applications of Lasers and Electro-Optics, Atlanta, Georgia (10/2015).

  • Best Poster Award at the International Conference on Optics of Surface and Interfaces, Austin, Texas (07/2015).

  • Faculty Investment Initiative Program Fellow, recognizing excellence among UT faculty (2015). 
  • OSA Fellow elected (2015). OSA - Optical Society of America.  
  • Plenary Speaker at the MicroTAS - Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences, San Antonio, Texas (10/2014).

  • Best Poster Award at the 40th Northeast Bioengineering Conference (NEBEC), Boston, MA (04/2014). 
  • Human Frontier Science Program Research Award (2012). Our international team was selected as # 3 among 1000 applications from all over the world.

  • NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (2011). 
  • Endowed Faculty Fellowship – Mr. N. Doug Williams Memorial Centennial Fellowship in Engineering (2011-present).
  • Faculty Research Assignment (2011-2012).
  • Keynote Speaker at the Royal Society International Scientific Seminar Meeting on the Topic "Making Light Deliver: Optical Nanosurgery for Targeted Drug Delivery," London, UK (June 2010).
  • Highlighted Article: Paper # 20 on "thermal analysis of gold nanorods heated with femtosecond laser pulses," published in the Journalof Physics D: Applied Physics in 2008, was selected as one of the 30 highlighted articles (out of the about 400 articles) published in 2008.
  • Keynote Speaker at the 5th International Conference on Microtechnologies in Medicine and Biology, Quebec City, Canada (April 2009).
  • NSF Career Award (2009-2014).
  • Plenary Talk at the opening session of Focus on Microscopy, Osaka, Japan (April 2008).
  • Highlighted Article: Paper # 12 on "Two-photon imaging of cancer cells using bio-conjugated gold nanorods" was featured as "Hot Paper" for being one of the most-cited articles published in Nano Letters in 2007.
  • Highlighted Article: Paper # 11 on "Thermal and fluid processes of a thin melt zone during femtosecond laser ablation of glass: the formation of rims by single laser pulses," published in the Journalof Physics D: Applied Physics in 2007, was selected as one of the 30 highlighted articles (out of the about 400 articles) published in 2007.
  • Honored as one of the Rising Stars of Texas at the Nano Summit Research Conference, Texas A&M University; TX (August 2007).
  • Summer Research Award from the University of Texas at Austin (2005).

As an undergraduate and graduate student:

  • First Place in the Ground Testing Technical Committee Student Contest, AIAA, awarded for the best graduate project in competition (1998).
  • Fulbright Graduate Student Scholarship (1995-97).
  • Zonta Amelia Earhart Award for Aeronautics Research (1995-97).
  • Gold Medal for the Best Graduate Student Paper, 45th IAFC (1994).
  • Ehud Ben-Amitay Student Research Award, Negev University, Israel (1994).
  • President's Honor List, Technion, Israel (1992). 

 

Research Interests

  • My research focuses on the creation of novel laser surgery and imaging technologies with high precision. In my group, we achieve this goal by exploiting the nonlinear interaction between femtosecond laser pulses and tissue as a precise ablation tool for surgery as well as a three-dimensional probing tool for imaging. We further improve the capabilities of these tools by using the nanoscale focusing power of plasmonic gold nanoparticles.

    We aim at advancing both biological sciences and clinical practice. To advance biological sciences, for example, we develop novel microfluidic devices for high throughout nanosurgery. To improve clinical practice, for example, we engineer new microsurgery instrumentation.  Our research problems range from understanding the biological mechanisms of nerve regeneration and degeneration after injury in model organisms to developing novel non-invasive optical tools for treatment and diagnosis of cancer.

  • Femtosecond laser microsurgery: Optical-scissors applicable at the sub-cellular and cellular level with application to nerve regeneration and cancer treatment. We perform both experimental and theoretical research to elucidate the fundamentals of fs-laser interaction with tissue and the physical processes involved during ablation (such as laser-induced cavitation bubble dynamics, extent of the laser-induced photo-damage, plasma shielding during surgery with low NA-lenses, laser-induced heating of gold nanoparticles in tissue, etc.).
  • High-throughput microfluidic devices for studying nerve regeneration and degeneration: Development of new microfluidic devices for studying the dynamic processes involved in nerve regeneration and degeneration of C. elegans and for enabling automated high throughput genetic and pharmacological screenings.
  • Miniaturized handheld probes for fs-laser microsurgery: Development of miniaturized endoscopic probes for fs-laser microsurgery guided by two-photon imaging, utilizing optical MEMS scanning mirrors and photonic crystal fibers.
  • Plasmonic laser nanosurgery using molecularly targeted gold nanoparticles: Fundamental study of laser nanoablation of biological materials based on laser-field enhancement near gold nanoparticles. The delivery of nanoparticles to biomarkers of interest allows for the removal of tissue in large areas using single laser pulses while ablation localized near nanoparticles improves the precision of the surgery at the nanoscopic levels.
  • Two-photon luminescence imaging using molecularly targeted gold nanorods: Development of a new multi-photon imaging modality using the bright luminescence properties of gold nanorods to increase imaging depth of highly scattered tissue for early cancer detection. We found that two photon luminescence of gold nanorod labeled cells is 3000 times brighter than the autofluorescence of unlabelled cells.
 

Ben-Yakar Lab Affiliations

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Contact Information

Prof. Adela Ben-Yakar
Phone: 512.475.9280
Email: ben-yakar@mail.utexas.edu

Ben-Yakar Group Offices: ETC 7.113
Phone: 512.471.7342

FemtoLab: ETC 7.106 | Phone: 512.471.7342
Mechanical Engineering Department C2200
University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX 78712

Shipping Address:
204 E. Dean Keeton Street Stop C2200
Austin, TX 78712-1591

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