Thomas O’Sullivan, PhD

Dr. Thomas O'Sullivan has been an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame since 2016. Prior to that he was the Director of the Diffuse Optical Spectroscopy and Imaging Laboratory at the Beckman Laser Institute at the University of California, Irvine and a U.S. Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program Postdoctoral Fellow. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2005 and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2007 and 2011, respectively. Dr. O'Sullivan is engaged in translational biomedical research based upon the development and application of deep tissue optical imaging and sensing. In particular, Dr. O'Sullivan’s lab is advancing diffuse optical spectroscopy and imaging (DOSI), which allows for contrast-free quantitative measurements of tissue architecture and metabolic function. This work, while relevant to many diseases, is presently focused on applications in breast cancer including risk assessment, screening, differential diagnosis, and predicting individual response to chemotherapy treatment.  Dr. O'Sullivan has co-founded one company in this area (NearWave Corp.) and holds several patents on DOSI-related technologies. In addition to his research, Dr. O’Sullivan is passionate about community outreach, has served the optics and photonics community as a senior member of OSA and SPIE, and is currently an associate editor for Biomedical Optics Express.