Lihong Wang earned his PhD degree at Rice University, Houston, Texas under the tutelage of Robert Curl, Richard Smalley, and Frank Tittel and currently holds the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professorship of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
His book entitled ''Biomedical Optics: Principles and Imaging'', one of the first textbooks in the field, won the 2010 Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award. He also coauthored a book on polarization and edited the first book on photoacoustic tomography. Professor Wang has published over 255 peer-reviewed journal articles with an h-index of 52 and delivered over 270 keynote, plenary, or invited talks.
He has received 28 research grants as the principal investigator with a cumulative budget of >$31M. Professor Wang is a Fellow of the AIMBE, OSA, IEEE, and SPIE. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics. He chairs the annual conference on Photons plus Ultrasound, and chaired the 2010 Gordon Conference on Lasers in Medicine and Biology and the 2010 OSA Topical Meeting on Biomedical Optics. He is a chartered member on an NIH Study Section. Professor Wang serves as the founding chairs of the scientific advisory boards for two companies commercializing his inventions. He received NIH’s FIRST and NSF’s CAREER awards. He was awarded the C. E. K. Mees Medal for “seminal contributions to photoacoustic tomography and Monte Carlo modeling of photon transport in biological tissues and for leadership in the international biophotonics community.”