Dr Stephen Matcher
"The use of optical imaging in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine"
Biography:
Stephen Matcher graduated from Imperial College London with a BSc in Physics and subsequently a PhD in optical astronomy. He translated his expertise in low-light-level imaging into medicine at University College London, where he developed near-infrared spectroscopy techniques to study tissue oxygen delivery, especially in newborn infants at risk from birth asphyxia. He then joined the staff of the Physics department at the University of Exeter, where he established research programmes in visible light spectroscopy of skin and optical coherence tomography (OCT).
In 2006 he joined the University of Sheffield where he is currently Reader in Biomedical Engineering. His chief research interest lies in the development and application of novel biophotonic imaging tools to aid the characterisation of native and engineered biological tissues. Primarily he works with OCT, including novel variants such as polarization-sensitive OCT for the non-invasive assessment of collagen organization and Doppler OCT for the measurement of fluid flow. He is currently collaborating with clinical colleagues to improve the detection of corneal stem cells post-implantation, to provide tools for the early detection and staging of epithelial cancer and to develop non-invasive tools to characterise skin barrier function. He also actively collaborates with the National Centre for III-V Technologies to develop improved light sources for biophotonic imaging.