Daniel Farkas

Daniel L. Farkas was trained in Theoretical Physics in Romania, and holds a Ph.D. in Biophysics and Biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he received a number of honors (Yashinsky Outstanding Graduate Student Prize, EMBO and UNESCO fellowships, Aharon Katchalsky-Katzir Award). He came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar (also holding a Dr. Chaim Weizmann fellowship), conducted research at UC San Diego and Univ. of Washington, Seattle, and was also a Fulbright lecturer at UC Berkeley. After junior faculty appointments in the US and at the Weizmann Institute, he settled at Carnegie Mellon University as Associate Director and then Director of the Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology (1992-2002), a National Science and Technology Center that won the Smithsonian Award for Science in 1996. Simultaneously, at the University of Pittsburgh he was Professor Bioengineering and Pathology, Director of the BioImaging Laboratories, and held core faculty appointments in the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the Univ. of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.

Additionally, he served (1995-2005) as Associate Director of the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative, a regional non-profit organization, recently named the National Tissue Engineering Center. In 2002 he came, as Vice-chairman for Research in the Department of Surgery, to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he was also (till July 1, 2010) Director of the Minimally Invasive Surgical Technologies Institute and Professor of Surgery and Biomedical Sciences.

Currently, on the academic side, he is Research Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the Univ. of Southern California; Adjunct Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University; and Visiting Professor at the Beckman Institute, California Institute of Technology. He published 160 articles and authored/edited 18 books, is on 11 journal editorial boards, chaired 25 international conferences and had $60 million in peer-reviewed funding to support his research for which he was awarded the Automated Imaging Association Award for Scientific Application (1994) and the Sylvia Sorkin Greenfield Award from the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (2002). In 2008 he was elected President of IMLAS, an international interdisciplinary surgical society.

Dr. Farkas also founded a number of successful high-tech startups, including ChromoDynamics, Inc. and TissueInformatics, Inc. He is currently founder and chairman of Spectral Molecular Imaging, Inc., EpiLumina, Inc., PhotoNanoscopy, Inc. and The Brain Window, Inc., and is actively focusing on their development. Having lived in several countries, he has 3 citizenships (including US), and is fluent in 5 languages.