Lingyan Shi

Lingyan Shi is currently a tenured Associate Professor in the Shu Chien Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering at UCSD. She joined UCSD in Fall 2019, following her postdoctoral training in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. Her lab at UCSD focuses on developing high-resolution multimodal nanoscopy to study metabolic activities in aging processes and related diseases. Notably, she discovered the "Golden Window" (1550nm to 1870nm) for deep tissue imaging and pioneered the "DO-SRS" metabolic imaging platform, which visualizes metabolic dynamics in cellular organelles, and tissues. Her group at UCSD advanced stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy into super-resolution multiplex nanoscopy by developing A-PoD and PRM algorithms, revealing various lipid metabolic changes in organ tissues during aging and disease. Dr. Shi holds 10 awarded patents and 17 pending. She won Blavatnik Regional Award for Young Scientists (2018), Nature Light Science & Applications’ Rising Star Award (2021), the Advancing Bioimaging Scialog Fellow Award 2023, the David L. Williams Lecture Scholarship Award (2023), the Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry (2023), the BMES-Cellular Molecular Bioengineering Rising Star Faculty Award (2024), the Davos Summit iCANx Young Scientist Award (2024), ICBME Rising Star Award 2024, IUPS Young Faculty Award 2024, Featured in the 2025 Optics notebook, Emerging Leader in Molecular Spectroscopy 2025, and elected senior member of National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Nominations

Please check back for the 2022 nomination deadline, or visit the Spectroscopy magazine website for more information.

Past Recipients

2024 Joseph P. Smith

2023      Dmitry Kurouski

2022       Lu Wei

2021       Bhavya Sharma

2020       Markita del Carpio Landry

2019       Ishan Barman

2018       Megan Thielges

2017       Russ Algar

2016       Matthew Baker