This is a past event.

Steven Rhese from the University of Windsor will be presenting at this week's Physics Colloquium. Please join this in-person presentation at 4 p.m. Thursday (April 6) in Fisher Hall 139.

HEALING HUMANITY ONE SPARK AT A TIME: DIAGNOSING BACTERIAL PATHOGENS WITH LASER-INDUCED BREAKDOWN SPECTROSCOPY

Abstract: There is a well-known and urgent need in the fields of medicine, environmental health and safety, food-processing, and defense/security to develop new 21^st Century technologies for the rapid and sensitive identification of bacterial pathogens.  In the last decade, the use of a real-time elemental (atomic) analysis performed with laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has made tremendous progress in becoming a viable technology for rapid bacterial pathogen detection and identification.  In this talk I will introduce the technique of LIBS and I will show how this laser-based optical emission spectroscopic technique is able to sensitively assay the elemental composition of bacterial cells in situ.  As well as providing a survey of the field, I will also present the latest achievements of our lab to fully develop LIBS-based bacterial sensing and I will report on our recent work to translate this technology from the laboratory to bench-top clinical instruments and protocols, and ultimately to field-portable and potentially man-portable instrumentation.  

Bio: Dr. Steven J. Rehse is a Professor of Physics and is currently the Head of the Department of Physics at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.  He received a B.S. in Physics from Michigan Technological University in 1994 and performed his undergraduate thesis work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where he performed experiments to use laser-induced fluorescence and laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy to monitor and analyze high temperature ablation in refractory carbide materials in support of the nuclear thermal rocket program.  After spending a year and a half at Los Alamos also working on the CALIOPE infrared LIDAR project, he attended Colorado State University in the Department of Physics where he received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Siu Au Lee.  His dissertation topic was the use of lasers to cool gallium atoms to allow their manipulation with resonant light-forces (cooling and trapping of atoms).  After receiving his doctorate, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada from 2002-2005 before accepting an assistant professorship at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.  He was at Wayne State from 2005-2011 before relocating across the Detroit River to Windsor, where he was hired to lead a new undergraduate medical physics program.  He has been at the University of Windsor since 2011 and conducts research into the use of the laser-based spectrochemical analysis technique known as “laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy,” particularly to analyze samples of medical interest, most specifically pathogenic bacteria.