People – Backman Laboratory

Principal Investigator: Vadim Backman, PhD

Dr. Vadim Backman is the Sachs Family Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Professor of Medicine (Hematology/Oncology) and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Associate Director of Research Technology and Infrastructure and Program Leader in Cancer and Physical Sciences at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Director of the Center for Physical Genomics and Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Medical Engineering from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Backman’s research is focused on bridging advances in biophotonics into biomedical research and clinical medicine. He develops novel optics technologies for characterization and imaging of biological tissue with a focus on the nanoscale and molecular levels. His research spans from cancer biophysics to novel optical diagnostic and imaging techniques to novel therapeutics and multi-center clinical trials. Dr. Backman has received numerous awards including being selected as one of the top 100 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review Magazine, the Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences, and he has served on multiple NIH and NSF review panels, as well as chairing various scientific conferences such as OSA Biomed and SPIE Biomedical Applications of Light Scattering. He has published more than 230 papers in peer-reviewed journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, PNAS, and Physical Review Letters and holds over 20 patents. In the past three years, he has served as the principle investigator on more than 20 grants from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, including an NIH U54 Center for Chromatin NanoImaging in Cancer and a Bioengineering Research Partnership. At Northwestern, he teaches advanced classes in optics and human physiology. Dr. Backman is the co-founder of three biotech companies.