Associate Professor, Opthalmology
rsabesan@uw.edu

Ramkumar Sabesan

Currently accepting graduate students.

Biomedical imaging
Adaptive optics
Functional imaging in live biological tissue
Confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscopy & Optical coherence tomography
Spatial and color vision

The Sabesan lab develops and uses novel cellular imaging tools which enable the visualization of the structure and function of living retinal cells at unprecedented spatial scales. The backbone of the methods pursued by the lab is a technology called adaptive optics – the same tool used by astronomers to peer at small objects in space. Using adaptive optics, one can overcome the optical imperfections that exist in the human eye converting the eyeball essentially into a microscope objective. By combining adaptive optics with other microscopy techniques, one obtains the ability to probe living cells in the retina of humans which are about ten times finer than the diameter of a human hair. This allows the probing of retinal cells in diseased human eyes at high resolution thus serving as sensitive biomarkers for early disease diagnosis and monitoring of cellular events involved in disease progression. Ultimately, the lab’s overarching goals are to develop novel, sensitive and objective outcome measures for vision restoration techniques aimed at repairing blinding eye diseases.
B.Tech. in Engineering Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India 2005
Ph.D. in Optics, Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester NY, 2012