Speaker

Lingyan Shi is a tenured Associate Professor of Bioengineering at UC San Diego, where her lab invented new microscopes that reveal the chemistry of life inside living tissue. She discovered the “Golden Window” (1550–1870 nm) — a band of light that can see unusually deep into tissue. She further pioneered DO-SRS, an imaging method that uses tagged water and nutrients to watch cells build brand-new molecules in real time, and developed a family of techniques (A-PoD, PRM, and SuMMIT-SRS) that push this imaging technique to super-resolution and let it track many molecules at once.

These tools can spot newly made lipids, proteins, DNA and RNA, carbohydrates, and other metabolites inside cells — even telling brand-new molecules apart from older ones, and revealing how metabolism differs from one cell type or organ to the next. Her team has used them to make discoveries with direct medical relevance: showing, for instance, that a protein linked to Alzheimer’s disrupts fat processing in the aging brain by driving support cells to overproduce fat droplets — an effect they were able to reverse. With SuMMIT-SRS, they have mapped how individual cell types rewire their metabolism across breast cancer models, fruit-fly tissue, aged human neurons, and mouse liver, establishing this imaging as a quantitative, non-invasive way to find biomarkers for development, aging, and drug response.

Dr. Shi holds 10 awarded and 18 pending patents. Her honors include the Blavatnik Regional Award for Young Scientists (2018), the Hellman Fellowship (2021), Scialog Fellowships in Advancing Bioimaging from RCSA and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (2021–2023), and the Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry (2023). She received the Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Rising Star Award (2024), the IUPS Young Faculty Award (2024), and the Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy Award (2025), and was elected to the National Academy of Inventors in 2025.

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