Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Columbia University
Dr. Hillman’s research focuses on capturing functional information about living tissues using optical techniques. A major theme of her laboratory is in-vivo neuroimaging, and, in particular the examination of the relationship between blood flow changes in the brain and underlying neuronal activity. This work has led to the development of a range of advanced in-vivo imaging technologies, including laminar optical tomography, Swept Confocally-Aligned Planar Excitation (SCAPE) microscopy, formerly known as Laser-Scanning Intersecting Plane Tomography (L-SIPT), and hyperspectral two-photon microscopy (Bouchard MB 2009, Bouchard MB 2015). Additional applications are being explored for these technologies, including clinical and pre-clinical imaging of living skin (Muldoon TJ 2012). The laboratory is also developing techniques for non-invasive ‘molecular imaging’ of small animals to allow improved studies of disease and development of new treatments drugs (Chen L 2011, Qiu J 2014). The lab focuses on understanding important questions such as how we speak and hear and the development of language.