Ji Yi is an associate professor of biomedical engineering. His research focuses on the complex structural organization of the biological systems which spans several orders of magnitude—from nanometers (e.g. chromatin compaction in nuclei) to centimeters (e.g. tissue and organ structures).
His lab designs and builds novel optical microscopy leveraging sub-cellular and cellular resolutions and sensitivity to utilize a broad spectrum of biophotonics contrasts, including elastic scattering, fluorescence, and non-linear light-tissue interaction. They specialize in volumetric imaging techniques, (e.g. optical coherence tomography, scanned light sheet microscopy) to observe sub-cellular details in 3D and in real-time. By combining multi-dimensional and multi-contrast imaging data, they develop computational approaches to synthesize highly multiplex imaging data and reveal unseen phenotypes that can be otherwise difficult to perceive using conventional tools.
Yi received his bachelor’s in biomedical engineering from Tsinghua University in 2005, his master’s in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University in 2009, and his doctorate in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University in 2012.