Elizabeth Hillman facts for kids

Elizabeth M. C. Hillman is a scientist from Britain. She is a professor at Columbia University. She teaches about how engineering and medicine can work together. She has won important awards for her work, like the Adolph Lomb Medal in 2011. She also won the SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award in 2018.

Her School Days

Elizabeth Hillman went to University College London to study physics. She got her first degrees in 1998. She then earned her PhD in Medical Physics and Bioengineering in 2002. For her PhD, she used a special method called optical tomography. This helped her take pictures of living biological tissue. After finishing her studies, she worked at a new biotech company in Boston.

Her Amazing Career

In 2003, Elizabeth Hillman became a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital. She joined Columbia University as a professor in 2006. There, she started her own lab. It was called the Laboratory for Functional Optical Imaging. She created new ways to take pictures in vivo, which means inside living things.

Seeing Inside Animals

She developed a special way to image small animals. This method used Dynamic Contrast to see their body parts. This new technique was later used by a company called PerkinElmer. In 2008, she won the Columbia Rodriguez Junior Faculty Award. She also received the Adolph Lomb Medal from The Optical Society in 2011. In 2010, she got an award from the National Science Foundation. This award helped her study in vivo Interventional Microscopy. She has explored many ways to use light for medical research. She has also received many grants to support her work.

Brain Research

In 2017, Professor Hillman started working at Columbia's Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. She also helped start a meeting called "Optics and the Brain" in 2015. She found out that tiny blood vessels are important for controlling blood flow in the brain. She has written articles for Scientific American. In 2017, she became a member of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

New Ways to Image

Elizabeth Hillman has created tools to take fast pictures of the whole brain. She invented a method called SCAPE microscopy. This method combines different imaging techniques. It uses one lens to light up and see tiny parts of a sample. She has also developed other imaging methods. These include laminar optical tomography and advanced two-photon microscopy.

Awards and Honors

• 2007, Wallace H Coulter Foundation Early Career Award
• 2007, Human Frontier of Science Program Young Investigator Award
• 2008, Columbia Rodriguez Junior Faculty Award
• 2010, National Science Foundation Career award
• 2011, Adolph Lomb Medal from The Optical Society
• 2018, SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award