Kristen C. Maitland

Dr.  Kristen Maitland is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University.

She has been awarded the NSF CAREER Award, the TEES Select Young Faculty Award, and is a Senior Member of SPIE – the International Optical Engineering Society. Her research focuses on the design, construction and testing of multi-modal, multi-scale, multi-dimensional and high-speed optical imaging systems for preclinical and clinical, in vivo and in situ imaging.

Due to the multidisciplinary nature of this research, her laboratory works in close collaboration with clinicians and biologists to understand the fundamental basis of biomedical problems to drive the design of optical systems. Specific projects include FLIM and reflectance confocal microscopy for early cancer detection, large-area confocal imaging to investigate inflammation and cancer pathogenesis, fiber-based fluorescence imaging to study bacterial pathogenesis, and head-mounted fluorescence imaging to investigate neural coding in songbirds.

In collaboration with Engineering World Health, Dr. Maitland is coordinating a study abroad program in Rwanda focused on innovative medical device design appropriate for hospitals and clinics in the developing world.

Dr. Maitland received her B.S. and M.S degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin as an NSF IGERT Research Fellow. Before joining the faculty at Texas A&M University in 2008, she served as Staff Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.