Fang Huang
Title:
Reilly Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
PhD Granting Institution:
University of New Mexico
Contact:
Email Address: fanghuang@purdue.edu
Office Phone: 765-494-6216
Lab Website Link: https://www.fanghuanglab.com/
Primary Training Group:
Biotechnology
Secondary Training Groups:
Biomolecular Structure and Biophysics, Integrative Neuroscience
Research Areas:
Ultra-high resolution optical imaging technology for neuroscience, cell biology and cancer
Current Projects:
The Huang lab focuses on biomedical technology development for high-resolution optical imaging and super-resolution microscopy/nanoscopy. The team collaborates closely with cell biologists, neuroscientists, and chemists to tackle fundamental biological questions in areas such as cytokinesis, epigenetics, neural circuits, and cell motility. We develop novel imaging instruments and analytical methods to visualize intra- and extra-cellular structures at the nanoscale in thick specimens such as tissues or small animals. In the past, the team developed novel Adaptive Optics and PSF engineering methods to super-resolve brain sections (Nature Methods, 15, 583-586, 2018), a deep learning framework for multiplexed single molecule analysis (Nature Methods, 15, 913-916, 2018), INSPR (in situ PSF retrieval) technology to expand the applicability of super-resolution imaging system from cells to tissues (Nature Methods, 17, 531-540, 2020) and most recently invented deep learning driven adaptive optics for deep tissue (up to 250 µm-cut tissue) super-resolution imaging (Nature Methods, 20, 1748–58, 2023). The team seeks to develop unconventional ultra-high resolution systems that synergistically combine ideas from engineering, physics, and mathematics such as interferometric/4Pi single molecule detection (Cell, 166, 4, 1028-1040, 2016), applied statistics (Nature Methods, 10, 653-658, 2013; Nature Methods, 14, 760-761, 2017) and coherent pupil function (Communications Biology, 3, 220, 2020) to significantly advance the achievable resolution limit for fixed and living specimens. Our most recent work on optical theory provided an update to Abbe’s diffraction limit, an 150-year old theory, by incorporating photon-statistics into resolution limit calculation, namely an information-based resolution limit for finite photons (Nature Communications, 15, 3760, 2024).
Importance of Interdisciplinary Research:
Our research integrates multiple disciplines including biology, engineering, optics, computer science, artificial intelligence and applied mathematics towards a fundamental change in the capacity of visualizing the microscopic world of life.