Li-Yu Yu

Li-Yu Yu is a PhD candidate whose research seeks to advance the growing field of spectroscopic microscopy, a powerful tool for delivering rich molecular information about an object through the measurement of its spatial and spectral characteristics. Potential applications of spectral microscopy range from medical diagnosis to pharmaceutical research and material identification. Lu-Yu’s current research, supported by a MathWorks Fellowship, addresses the crucial drawback of poor spectral signal-to-noise ratio in conventional dispersive spectrometers and limited spectral tuning capability in conventional laser sources. His goal is to develop a new spectroscopic measurement strategy that leverages illumination encoding and model-based AI to achieve broadband, real-time, super-resolved spatiospectral image reconstruction, offering a platform for advanced functional analysis in a sophisticated multicellular environment. MATLAB has been an essential tool in this work, enabling the simulation of optical physics, optimization, signal processing, and machine learning. Li-Yu’s work has the potential for far-reaching impact in the field of spectroscopic microscopy and could deliver useful new perspectives and open-source data processing tools (including tools to support a core data processing challenge of compressive sensing and spectral unmixing) to advance innovative research across the imaging and sensing, and signal processing communities.