Mohammad Azizian

Infrared microscpectroscopy, Adaptive Optics, Phase retrieval, Super resolution microscopy, Photoacoustics, Inverse prolems.

The rich optical contrast allows for obtaining high resolution signatures of sample compartments at molecular level for almost any state of matter. In biomedical sciences, it is used to develop understanding of tissue complexity and its “mechanism of action” where many possible clinical phenotypes can be predicted by molecular fingerprints. In particular, the inter-atomic degrees of freedom within a molecule yields a series of discrete, vibrational states which uniquely resonance in the long-wave infrared. It is hope that these information usher the new era of personalising diagnosis and therapy and escalade the current standard of theranostics.  In order to fully investigate the so called “mechanism of action”, the full-field monitoring in dynamic manner seems inevitable. Many IR microscopes are equipped with multipixel Focal Plane Array (FPA) detectors which drastically improve the spatio-temporal data acquisition by simultaneous collection of diffraction limited resolved data. Yet, efficient coupling of the synchrotron radiation remained challenging due to the structured nature of the source. The full-field implementation of synchrotron radiation with multichannel FPA based FTIR requires a uniform photon budget for each pixel to avoid spatio-spectral artefacts. The latter can be achieved by introducing adaptive optics in the setup and optimization algorithm to extend the capabilities of the SR-FTIR in the temporal domain.

I am interested in the development of novel imaging tools based on various optical and ultrasonic techniques, image reconstruction, and inverse problems in imaging and theoretical image science in order to enable imaging with high spatial and temporal resolution on different scales, from organ to cell. 

Mohammad Azizian is a PDRA at the Infrared Beamline B22 (MIRIAM). His primary focus is on the novel use of adaptive optics for full-field IR microscopy via FPA detector and Synchrotron IR illumination. Mo joined Diamond in 2019 from the Institute of Cancer Research, University of London, where he worked as a Post Doctoral researcher on the development of a sparse hyperspectral optical projection tomography. He received his Ph.D in acoustics from INSA Lyon, University of Lyon. His research includes development of novel optical imaging and spectroscopic techniques for studying biological samples at macro down to micro-scale. He is also interested in interdisciplinary electromagnetic/acoustic imaging, compressed sensing, image and signal processing and inverse problems.