Advanced Optical Materials for Bioimaging and Sensing

Mid-infrared photonics provides direct access to the characteristic vibrational fingerprints of molecules, creating opportunities for compact and selective sensors in environmental monitoring, healthcare, industrial process control, and security. Translating this spectral advantage into deployable systems, however, requires more than high-performance optical designs. Material selection, fabrication scalability, device architecture, analyte interaction, and signal-transduction mechanisms must be considered together.

This presentation will examine the principal material platforms for mid-infrared photonics, including silicon, germanium, silicon nitride, chalcogenide glasses, III–V semiconductors, and emerging wide-bandgap and two-dimensional materials. Their transparency ranges, optical properties, fabrication compatibility, and integration challenges will be compared. Key sensing approaches, including evanescent-wave absorption, resonant and plasmonic enhancement, photothermal detection, and heterogeneous source and detector integration, will also be discussed. Particular emphasis will be placed on manufacturability, packaging, reproducibility, calibration, and system-level performance. The presentation will conclude with emerging strategies for transforming mid-infrared photonics from laboratory demonstrations into scalable, reliable, and field-deployable molecular sensing technologies.

About the presenter
Rana Faryad Ali is a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he works on mid-infrared photonics, integrated optical devices, and advanced photonic materials. His research focuses on the design, fabrication, and characterization of nanophotonics, metasurfaces, nonlinear optical materials, and sensing platforms, with particular interest in scalable manufacturing and practical system integration.

He earned his Ph.D. in Materials Chemistry from Simon Fraser University. Dr. Ali has authored more than 12+ peer-reviewed publications and has broad experience in nanophotonics, optical interconnects, nanofabrication, optical characterization, materials synthesis, and device modeling.