Kamran Avanaki is currently an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Dermatology Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Prior to this position, he was an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Department at Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Kent, the United Kingdom with an Outstanding Achievement Honor in Medical Optical Imaging and Computing in 2012. His areas of expertise are design and development of photoacoustic imaging technology and optical coherence tomography for biomedical applications to solve critical problems in brain and skin imaging. As principle investigator, he has received multiple research grants/ fellowships including two NIH R01s, and a Melanoma Research Alliance Grant. He has received several other awards including Michigan Translational Research and Commercialization (MTRAC), American Cancer Society Seed Award, The Tech Transfer Talent Network (T3N) Award, Michigan Children’s Hospital Foundation Award, Entrepreneurship and the Anderson Institute Award, Richard Barber Interdisciplinary Research Award, Albert and Goldye J. Nelson Award, and Dean’s Diversity Fellowship. He has published in numerous high-level journals such as, PNAS, Cancer Research, IEEE Transaction of Biomedical Imaging, Photoacoustics, Journal of Biomedical Optics, Optics Letters, Applied Optics, and IEEE Journals including more than 80 first-authored/ senior authored peer-reviewed articles. His Google Scholar citation is over 2100 with an h-index of 23. In addition to serving on the technical program committees for SPIE PW, IEEE ICIP, ICACCI and MICCAI conferences, he has delivered 46 keynotes, plenary, or invited talks, and presented papers at several conferences across the globe, such as IEEE Photonics, MICCAI, MIUA, MVIP, as well as SPIE Photonics West. He is an associate editor of Applied Optics Journal and Frontiers in Neuroscience. He is also an active reviewer of 20 journals including PNAS, PLOS ONE, Cancer Research, Scientific Report, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, MICCAI, Journal of Biomedical Optics, Applied Optics, Optics Letters, Optics Express, and Sensor. He has mentored /co-mentored more than 30 graduate students and has been awarded the Outstanding Faculty Award three times (in 2016, 2017, and 2019) at Wayne State University. He also received the Research Excellence Award and Excellence in Teaching Award in 2019 from the Engineering School at Wayne State University. He has also received the Wayne State University Academy of Scholars Junior Faculty Award in 2020.

PhD, The University of Kent in Canterbury