YIQIONG ZHAO, Ph.D.

EDUCATION: Ph.D. in Optics, University of Science and Technology of China, 2005

Bachelor of Physics (Optical Information Science and Technology),

University of Science and Technology of China, 2000

EXPERIENCE:

Dr. Zhao is an assistant professor of Physics Department and Electro-Optics Program at the University of Dayton. Her research interests focus on the area of physical optics, which is highly interdisciplinary and combine techniques from the fields of optical tweezers, laser physics, optical engineering, biophysics, and physical chemistry. She conducts researches on optical design, modeling, analysis and optimization for optical manipulation, optical cell sugeries, microfluidic flow cytometry, optical super-resolution imaging and chemical reactions.

Dr. Zhao's research efforts have included using strongly focused laser beams to perform nanoscale surgeries on individual cells, microfluidic flow cytometry, optical angular momentum transfer and lab-on-a-chip integration of capillary electrophoresis separation with electroosmotic-flow driven droplet generation. She has contributed to several researches on the use of new laser beams (termed “Optical vortices”) to perform cell surgeries and to cause nanoscale water droplets to fuse together so as to initiate chemical reactions for nano scale drugs delivery. Dr. Zhao have also made predictions and experimental demonstration on the ability of photons to interchange spin and orbital angular momentum when they interact with an optically-trapped particle. She presented a new method for carrying out flow cytometry, which employed optical gradient forces to guide and focus particles in the fluid flow. Additionally, she is providing valuable theoretical work that is helping in the development of new optical imaging technologies, giving a super resolution view which can be used to better study cells.

Dr. Zhao has also worked on optimum design of diffractive optical elements (DOE) for beam shaping and optical trapping. She designed a DOE to produce a conveyable quasi-periodic optical chain that can stably trap and deliver multiple individual particles in three dimensions at different planes near focus. In addition, she has developed a vector angular-spectrum iterative algorithm to design DOE to produce uniform illumination. Dr. Zhao also played an important role in designing, fabricating and testing DOE applied to uniform illumination to meet specification.

Dr. Zhao has also involved in developing laser tweezers for membrane free coherent diffraction microscopes aimed at nanoscale resolution of object imaging. Diffraction microscopy is a form of imaging that determines the structure of an object to very high resolution from a measurement of only its far-field diffraction pattern. She and her colledges are developing the technique by using of optical tweezers to trap and suspend micro sized particle for isolating the samples from the surrounding with free parasitic scattering to create a membrane free environment for coherent x-ray diffraction microscopes imaging. This work is expected to result in higher resolution of nanoscale imaging especially for biological samples.

Dr. Zhao’s research has resulted in about 17 journal publications in Physical Review Letters, Nano Letters, Optics Letters, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., and etc.