Maharbiz pioneered millimeter- and sub-millimeter-scale 'neural dust' motes that use ultrasonic power and backscatter telemetry for wireless, batteryless neural and physiological sensing, alongside other micro/nanoscale bioelectronic interfaces.
David Maresca's lab pushes the boundaries of biomedical ultrasound imaging. Research: (1) functional ultrasound imaging of the brain at cellular resolution (vascular signal decoding, brain-computer interface applications); (2) engineering gas vesicle and microbubble acoustic contrast agents as genetically-encoded biosensors; (3) ultrafast ultrasound for cardiac imaging. The lab aims to image individual cells deep inside living organs using next-generation ultrasound. NWO Vici Grant (2026); Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Dynamic Imaging grant.
Marko's lab applies statistical mechanics and single-molecule micromanipulation -- principally magnetic tweezers -- to chromosome structure and DNA-protein interactions, studying how condensin, topoisomerases, and other nucleoid-associated proteins organize and mechanically stabilize chromatin and mitotic chromosomes in vivo and in vitro. The group combines force spectroscopy with fluorescence microscopy to resolve single-DNA and single-chromosome mechanics at the piconewton scale.
Marriott engineers reversibly photoswitchable fluorescent and bioluminescent proteins and uses optical lock-in detection to achieve high-contrast, super-resolution imaging of specific proteins deep within scattering tissue.
McKendry co-directs Q-BIOMED, the UK's national quantum-biomedical-sensing research hub (UKRI/NIHR, ~GBP24M), which brings NV-diamond and other quantum sensors into clinical diagnostics. Her own group has developed nitrogen-vacancy nanodiamond-labelled lateral-flow and rapid molecular tests -- including a quantum-enhanced SARS-CoV-2 antigen test and single-molecule HIV RNA detection -- that exploit resonant microwave control of the NV spin state to separate signal from background and push rapid point-of-care diagnostics toward single-molecule sensitivity, a direct human-diagnostics application of quantum sensing.
Meade designs bioinorganic coordination complexes and nanoparticle- and genetically-encoded contrast agents that act as activatable molecular MRI sensors, reporting on enzyme activity, gene expression, and neurochemistry in living tissue, alongside electronic biosensors and transcription-factor inhibitors for molecular imaging and diagnostics.
Metivier (PPSM) studies photochromic and fluorescent molecules at the single-molecule level - photoswitching kinetics, energy transfer and orientation-resolved imaging - underpinning super-resolution (RESOLFT/STORM-type) probes and molecular sensors. In the broader landscape of NV-centre ensemble quantum sensing (DEER, nano-NMR, T1 relaxometry) operating near pT/sqrt(Hz) sensitivity, this work is paralleled by molecular photoswitches enabling optical super-resolution.
Micolich works on semiconductor nanowire and organic/polymer nanoelectronic devices, with two strands relevant here: the physics of low-dimensional transport and noise in nanowire transistors, and the use of those devices as transducers at the interface with biological systems, where a nanowire field-effect transistor acts as an extremely local potentiometer sensitive to charge and potential changes at the cell membrane. The group has a strong record in noise spectroscopy — using 1/f and random telegraph noise as a diagnostic rather than a nuisance. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — nanowire FET bioelectronic sensing is the principal electrical competitor to NV-based bio-magnetometry: both aim to read out cellular electrophysiology without patch-clamping, one via magnetic fields at pT/sqrt(Hz), the other via local potential. Borderline inclusion, kept because the bio-interface sensing thread is genuine.
Miller designs synthetic VoltageFluor-class fluorescent dyes that report membrane potential with millisecond time resolution in neurons and other excitable cells, providing an optical alternative to patch-clamp electrophysiology for large-scale voltage imaging.
Mirkin invented spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) -- gold nanoparticles densely coated with a radial shell of oligonucleotides -- and their 'nanoflare' derivatives, which enter live cells without transfection agents and light up sequence-specifically upon binding intracellular mRNA, enabling live-cell gene-expression biosensing, circulating-tumor-cell isolation, and simultaneous mRNA detection/regulation. This label-based intracellular biosensing platform is offered as a borderline but well-established inclusion under the biosensing/dye-based imaging criterion.