Following a long stint at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Irving Bigio joined Boston University as Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. His research activities address the interactions of light with cellular and tissue structures on the microscopic and mesoscopic scales. He pioneered methods of elastic scattering spectroscopy and has developed practical diagnostic and sensing applications that have been demonstrated in large clinical studies. He has co-authored over two hundred scientific publications and is an inventor on nine patents. Trained in optical physics, he gains satisfaction from explaining the fundamentals of complex phenomena in biomedical optics on an intuitive level. He believes that historical developments in physics theory and artistic expression have influenced each other, leading to parallels between the concepts of physical science and the movements in art. He is convinced that Vincent Van Gogh understood the scattering of starlight by interstellar dust (and was aware of spiral galaxies), as evidenced by Starry Night. He is also convinced that the medical field is finally "discovering" the benefits of various clinical applications of biomedical optics.
