George Barbastathis
Professor, Mechanical Engineering
MIT

George Barbastathis received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1993 from the National Technical University of Athens ( Εθνικό Μετσόβιο Πολυτεχνείο ) and the MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1994 and 1997, respectively, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech.) After post – doctoral work at the DRAFT – Subject to Change University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign, he joined the faculty at MIT in 1999, where he is now Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He has worked or held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the National University of Singapore, and the University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute ( 密西根交大学院 ) in Shanghai, China.

Since 2006, he has been involved with the Singapore – MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMAR T) Centre as Principal Investigator in several interdisciplinary groups, including optical inspection methods for cell manufacturing and biomechanical analysis of the retina for glaucoma forecasting. He is presently faculty co – lead of the AFOSR MURI “Searching for what’s new” in x – ray microscopy, pursuing novel computational imaging approaches for quantifying complex objects and processes at the nanoscale. His research interests are in machine learning and optimization for computational imaging and inverse problems; and optical system design, including artificial optical materials and interfaces. He is member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS), a Fellow of the Optical Society of Ameri ca (OSA) and the Society for Photo Instrumentation Engineering (SPIE), and served as Associate Editor for the journal Optica from 2019 till 2024. In his free time, he enjoys urban art and design, and aspires to become more fluent in eastern languages, especially Mandarin Chinese and Thai.