Dr. Anita Mahadevan-Jansen has recently been appointed as the Orrin H. Ingram Professor of Biomedical Engineering of the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering. Mahadevan-Jansen received her master's and Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and joined Vanderbilt's engineering faculty as an assistant professor in 1998.
Mahadevan-Jansen develops applications of optical techniques for diagnosis of pathology. Her primary research investigates the applications of optical spectroscopies and imaging for cancer diagnosis and guidance of therapy. She discovered a unique, natural fluorescent signature to parathyroid glands, which allows a simple and reliable optical detector to positively identify the glands during endocrine surgery. This discovery was reported in the July 2011 issue of the Journal of Biomedical Optics.
