FENS Seminars – Prof. Dr. Mehmet Burçin Ünlü
Prof. Dr. Mehmet Burçin Ünlü from Boğaziçi University will be the guest of KHAS Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences seminar series with his speech “The Use of Optical Tweezers and Photoacoustic Microscopy in Radiation Oncology” on Friday, September 23 at 2 pm.
The event will take place in Fener Hall and is open to anyone interested.
Abstract: In the first part of my talk, I will talk about the use of optical tweezers to quantify the effects of radiation therapy on the red blood cells (RBCs). RBCs were exposed to clinically prescribed radiotherapy doses of 2 Gy, 12 Gy and, 25 Gy, and each radiotherapy dose group was compared to a non-irradiated group. Cells were characterized by stretching using dual-beam optical tweezers and compared using the resulting deformability index. We conclude that the measurement of deformability index by dual-beam optical tweezers can serve as a sensitive biomarker to probe responses of cells to the radiotherapy.
In the second part of my talk, I will discuss: 1) increasing the contribution of targeted gold/gold sulfide nanoparticles to the enhancement of radiation therapy at the cellular level and 2) investigating the relationship between ionizing radiation and gold/gold sulfide nanoparticles using a scanning acoustic microscope (SAM) and photoacoustic microscope (PAM) 3) demonstrating the enhancement effect of gold/gold sulfide nanoparticles on radiation therapy.
About the Speaker: Mehmet Burcin Unlu received his bachelors and masters degrees from METU and Boğaziçi departments and completed his Ph.D. at Stevens Institute of Technology. In his postdoctoral work, he focused on cancer imaging and medical physics. He worked as a researcher for five years at the Tu &Thomas Yuen Center for Functional Onco-Imaging, Radiological Sciences, School of Medicine, the University of California at Irvine. He has been a faculty member in the Department of Physics at Boğaziçi University since 2009. He was the head of the same department between 2018 and 2020. He received a Fulbright fellowship and worked at Stanford University School of Medicine Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine for one year between 2017- 2018. He went to Hokkaido University School of Medicine and worked on proton therapy for six months. Burcin Unlu continues to work on biomedical physics and applications of physics in the field of health at the Bogazici University Medical Imaging Lab, which he founded in 2012.