About David D. Sampson

David Sampson is the Head of the Optical and Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at the School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Engineering Computing & Mathematics at The University of Western Australia. Professor Sampson has over fifteen years research experience in the fields of optics and photonics, and applications in communications, sensors, and biomedicine. His early research in optical communications centred on the technique of photonic code-division multiple access (CDMA). He continues to be well cited for his contributions, which include the invention of several schemes based on broadband light, practical demonstrations, and the understanding of fundamental limits of the optical version of this widely used communications technique. He has also made contributions to wavelength-division multiplexing transmission and networking, through his studies of schemes based on spectrally slicing broadband light. His early demonstration of the modification of the gain spectrum of an optical amplifier through cascaded sections of differently doped fibres predated an explosion of work on gain flattening in optical amplifiers. At UWA, Prof. Sampson's interests switched to the field of biomedical optical engineering, with an emphasis on imaging and microscopy. His group, the Optical+Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, is involved in activities ranging from the invention and investigation of new optical techniques to the engineering of these techniques into practical instruments for application in biology or medicine. A major emphasis of his research is the coherent imaging modality optical coherence tomography, which continues the theme, begun in his communications research, of exploitation of the coherence properties of broadband light sources. His interest in coherent imaging has recently been extended to Fourier holography. He is also interested in tissue optics and diffuse light propagation in tissue. Outcomes in optical coherence tomography (OCT) span theory, technology and applications. Theoretical contributions include the determination of limits on resolution set by absorption and dispersion in tissue, and an understanding of OCT speckle. Technology outcomes have centered on frequency-domain optical delay line technology, including demonstrations of ultra-long scanning, variable and dynamic dispersion compensation, and achromatic phase shifting. His most significant practical outcome has been in the development of anatomical OCT, which has enabled the first quantitative long-term bedside observations of the human upper airway during sleep, and which is being used to study sleep apnoea. He remains vitally interested in skin cancer diagnosis through low cost means, and has demonstrated a method based on diffuse reflectance spectroscopy to differentiate between malignant melanoma and benign naevi (moles) in vivo. His most recent outcome is the demonstration of a Fourier holographic microscopy technique that can characterise microstructure in biological samples without directly resolving it, making it possible to quantify large sample areas in a single image. Prof. Sampson has formed strong collaborations with biological and medical researchers and clinicians. He is a strong promoter of the importance of interdisciplinary engagement as the basis for a stimulating and productive intellectual environment. Prof. Sampson has attracted career research funding of $10.18M, including $1.70M from industry, and published in excess of 60 journal articles with an average citation rate of 8.9 per paper and in excess of 500 ISI citations. He has been invited to speak at 17 conferences in the last five years. He has previously been an associate editor for the Optical Society of America's Applied Optics (1999-2005) and has been involved in the running of more than 20 conferences, including representing the Asia Pacific for the Optical Fiber Communications conference (1996-1998), serving as Technical Programme Chair for the Asia Pacific Communications conference (1997), co-chairing Focus on Microscopy (2006), and chairing the International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors in 2008.