Michalina Gora joined the Wyss Center as Neurophotonics Manger in November 2021. Her role is to develop and execute neurophotonics projects at the Center, at various development stages from early ideas to preclinical and early stage clinical.

Her work is motivated by solving medical problems and her approach is to interlink the scientific development with regulatory guidelines from the very beginning of the project. She has over ten years of experience in academic interdisciplinary research in close collaboration with medical doctors. She previously developed, and translated to ‘first in human’, Optical Coherence Tomography imaging devices for ophthalmology and gastroenterology.

She is now starting a new research direction focused on investigation of the connection between the gut and the brain using light to improve management of neuro and digestive disorders.

She obtained her PhD in Physics and Biomedical Engineering in 2010 from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland. Subsequently, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the team of Prof. Guillermo Tearney at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and later a junior faculty at Harvard Medical School in Boston. In 2015 she joined the ICube Laboratory at French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) where she led a research group focused on combining optical imaging methods with robotics for comprehensive diagnosis and improved minimally invasive treatment of diseases.