Biography

In 2019, Robert Alfano received SPIE (Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) Gold Medal Award, the highest honor bestowed by the society. Robert Alfano is an Italian-American experimental physicist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering at the City College and Graduate School of New York of the City University of New York, where he is also the founding Director of the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers (1982). He is a pioneer in the fields of Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy, Ultrafast lasers and optics, tunable lasers, semiconductor materials and devices, optical materials, biophysics, nonlinear optics and photonics; he has also worked extensively in nanotechnology and coherent backscattering. His discovery of the white-light supercontinuum laser is at the root of optical coherence tomography, which is breaking barriers in ophthalmology, cardiology, and oral cancer detection (see "Better resolution with multibeam OCT," page 28) among other applications. He initiated the field known now as Optical Biopsy
He recently calculated he has brought in $62 million worth of funding to CUNY during his career, averaging $1.7 million per year. He states that he has accomplished this feat by "hitting the pavement"; he developed a habit of aggressively reaching out to funding partners and getting them interested in his work. Alfano has made discoveries that have furthered biomedical optics, in addition to fields such as optical communications, solid-state physics, and metrology. Alfano has an outstanding track record for achievements regarding the development of biomedical instruments. His contributions to photonics are documented in more than 700 research articles, 102 patents, several edited volumes and conference proceedings, and well over 10,000 citations. He holds 45 patents and published over 230 articles in the biomedical optics area alone. His discovery of the white-light supercontinuum laser is at the root of optical coherence tomography, which is breaking barriers in ophthalmology, cardiology, and oral cancer detection (see "Better resolution with multibeam OCT," page 28) among other applications. Alfano has trained and mentored over 52 PhD candidates and 50 post-doctoral students. For the past ten years, he has trained innumerable high school students in hands on photonics.