Lev T. Perelman

Lev T. Perelman is an American biological physicist and bioengineer at Harvard. He holds the Mary Tolan and Edward Grzelakowski Endowed Chair, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and is the Director of the Center for Advanced Biomedical Imaging and Photonics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.^[1] He is known for his work on biomedical light scattering spectroscopy and application of optics and spectroscopy to life sciences and developmental and cell biology.^[2][3][4]

Lev T. Perelman
Scientific career
Fields	Biological physics, Bioengineering
Institutions	Harvard University Harvard Medical School Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Website	cabip-harvard.org/perelman

Background and education

Perelman is the son of theoretical physicist Theodore L. Perelman, who solved the Conjugate convective heat transfer problem and made contributions in the development of a two-temperature model that describes electron and phonon temperature distributions in metals heated by ultrashort-pulsed lasers.^[5]

Perelman completed his undergraduate degree in theoretical physics from Belarus University and doctoral degree in physics from Institute of Physics in Minsk in 1989. He joined MIT in 1992 as a postdoctoral fellow in biological physics.^[6]

Career

Perelman was appointed a principal scientist at MIT in 1995. In 2000, he joined the faculty at Harvard University, where he is currently a professor.^[1]

Perelman was a member of the United States Department of Health and Human Services Joint Working Group charged with setting up funding priorities in oncologic imaging in the U.S.^[7]

Research

Perelman with Vadim Backman, an HST graduate student, introduced biomedical light scattering spectroscopy (LSS) in 1998.^[8] This approach was later applied for detection of precancer in esophagus,^[9][10] colon,^[11][12] urinary bladder and oral cavity,^[11] cervix,^[13][14] pancreatic cysts,^[15][16] and bile duct.^[17] This technique was later extended to subcellular scales with development of confocal light absorption and scattering spectroscopic microscopy^[18][19] for label-free subcellular functional imaging, sensing chromatin packing in live cells,^[20] and demonstrating that exosomes promote tumorigenesis.^[21]

Perelman's other contributions include demonstration of the world's first single-molecule detection with Surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS),^[22] and explanation of the critical role of stress confinement in short pulse laser ablation and laser surgery.^[23] He also developed with John Marshall the first non-hydrostatic model of the ocean known as the MIT General Circulation Model.^[24][25]