Distinguished Speaker Series | Maciej Wojtkowski PhD

Prof. Maciej Wojtkowski, Ph.D. hab., (born in 1975) is a physicist specialising in applied optics, as well as medical and experimental physics. His scientific career began at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. This was where he defended his Master’s thesis (at the Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Informatics), and then the Doctoral and Habilitation theses (both degrees were conferred by the Institute of Physics, at the Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Informatics). Between 1998 and 1999 he was employed as a research fellow with the University of Vienna, Austria, and between 2003 and 2005 with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the United States. He has also completed several scientific internships, including at the University of Kent in Canterbury, the United Kingdom, at the University of Vienna, Austria, at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and at the New England Eye Center in Boston, the United States. Since 2016 he has chaired the Department of Physical Chemistry of Biological Systems at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. He was elected Chair of that Department in an international competition held within the ERA Chairs grant. He has authored over 160 scientific publications, as well as several patents and patent applications. His works have been published in the following magazines: Ophthalmology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,Nature Medicine,Optics Express, Journal of Biomedical Optics and Optics Letters. He has designed, inter alia, an optical tomograph used for non-invasive contact-free eye examinations. In 2012 this invention received the FNP Award in the field of mathematical, physical and engineering sciences, often referred to as the Polish Nobel Prize. The tomograph prototypes developed by Prof. Wojtkowski have formed the basis for constructing numerous devices currently in use in ophthalmology clinics and rooms all over the world. Recently, the optical tomography method has been employed in cardiac diagnostics to detect ischaemic heart disease.