Joseph Walsh

• Member, FRA Board of Directors for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
• Vice-President for Research; Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University

Dr. Walsh is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Vice President for Research at Northwestern University in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois. He serve in the dean’s office of Northwestern’s Engineering School from 2002-2007 where his most recent position was as the Senior Associate Dean.

His research area is the study of light-tissue interactions. He has an ~25-year history of investigating the photophysics and photobiology of laser-based ablation. He is currently investigating tissue birefringence feedback systems, the propagation of polarized light in tissue, optically induced stimulation of the auditory system, and nanostructured surfaces for biosensing applications. Dr. Walsh is a co-investigator in an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center that conducts research at the confluence of university engineering teaching and educational theory. He is the principle investigator on two NIH grants: one that has resulted in the development of a surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy glucose sensor; the other that has yielded a polarization based imaging system for identification of pathologic lesions without biopsy. He also serves as an investigator on an NIH sponsored project developing systems for the optical stimulation of the auditory system. Dr. Walsh has been a program chairman for 5 major conferences in his field in the past 15 years; most recently as the program chairman for the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society. He is a past-president of the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery.

Dr. Walsh conducted his doctoral research in the Wellman Laboratories at the Massachusetts General Hospital and received his Ph.D. from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology.