A/Prof. Jiawen Li

Dr Jiawen Li is an inventor and highly adaptable engineer leading the intravascular imaging program at the Institute of Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS). Her innovation has led to her being selected as Fellow of NHMRC, National Heart Foundation and L’Oréal-UNESCO. She has won numerous prestigious awards and honours (including Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature, Global 35 Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, Young Tall Poppy Science Award, Superstar of STEM, Australian and New Zealand Optical Society Mid-Career Prize, National Heart Foundation Innovation Award, and Best New Invention Award by Knowledge Commercialisation Australasia). She has also secured >$13 million research funding as a chief investigator (>$7.5 million as the lead chief investigator CI-A, including MRFF EMCR, NHMRC Ideas, Investigator and Development grants). Jiawen and her team are developing ultrathin, flexible, multimodal fibre-optic imaging probes that will enable cross-sectional visualisation of vascular arteries with high resolution, molecular contrast, and sensitivity that are not possible with any other existing technologies. This cutting-edge tool will underpin biological studies to help answer fundamental questions at cellular level of how plaques evolve, how they cause heart attacks, and how they respond to different treatment.