Doctoral Celebration of Lucas Kreiß
On February 10, Lucas Kreiß successfully defended his Doctoral Thesis with the title “Advanced Optical Technologies for Label-free Tissue Diagnostics – A complete workflow from the optical bench, over experimental studies to data analysis”. He passed the written and oral examination with distinction. Although the COVID-19 pandemic still restricted us to a virtual celebration, we all enjoyed the custom-made doctoral hat. During his thesis, Lucas worked on optical system designs for label-free diagnostics of biomedical tissues, carried out countless experimental studies and developed robust methods for data analysis. Thereby, he optimized the setup of label-free multiphoton microscopy and worked on label-free Raman spectroscopy. Both of these technologies can be used to analyze native tissue features from unprepared and fresh tissue samples. Most notably, he helped to engineer a multiphoton endomicroscope for in vivo application in rodent. The compact and mobile design of this system allows longitudinal in vivo studies by label-free imaging in pre-clinical studies. In close collaboration with our friends at the university clinics of Erlangen (https://www.medizin1.uk-erlangen.de/forschung/arbeitsgruppen/ag-prof-m-waldner/), Lucas applied all of these advanced optical systems to many pre-clinical studies on inflammatory bowel disease. Thereby, Lucas demonstrated the benefit of label-free optical imaging at histology-like quality for the direct visualization of immune infiltration and tissue remodeling during colitis. Finally, he engaged in the design of systematic quantification methods and developed manual as well as software tools for quantitative image analysis. During his doctoral thesis, Lucas truly showed the complete workflow from the optical bench, over experimental studies to data analysis, which is also well documented by several publications in renown scientific journals like Advanced Science or Gastroenterology.
