Daniel L. Farkas, PhD
Vice Chair Research, Department of Surgery
Director, Minimally Invasive Surgical Technologies Institute
Daniel L. Farkas, PhD, is a Director of the Minimally Invasive Surgical Technologies Institute at Cedars-Sinai. In addition, Dr. Farkas is Research Professor in biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California and Adjunct Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Farkas' scientific interests center on the investigation of the living state with light for uses in biology, biotechnology, bioengineering and medicine. Optical bioimaging and biophotonics (particularly by automated, high-resolution microscopy, spectral imaging, coherence-based methods and endoscopy) are the main technology areas currently pursued in his labs. This research has applications in the fields of molecular and developmental biology, transplantation immunology, neurosciences, cardiology and tissue engineering.
Dr. Farkas currently is focusing on minimally invasive surgery, the operating room of the future, innovative oncology research and regenerative medicine at the mesoscopic level. His group's ability to monitor events with high spatiotemporal resolution and non-invasively in vivo significantly increased relevance, in studies of 3-D tissue architecture and physiology, cancer detection, stem cell engraftment, tissue oxygenation, transplant rejection and cardiovascular intervention.
His work has been described in more than 100 publications (such as Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Cancer Research, Oncogene, Medical Physics, Journal of Neuroscience, Biophysiology Journal and Stem Cells, among others). His research has been supported by about $50 million dollars in peer-reviewed funding.
Dr. Farkas has chaired more than 20 international scientific meetings, including the United Engineering Foundation Conference on Advances in Optics for Biotechnology, Medicine and Surgery Surgery and the Keystone Symposium on Optical Bioimaging: Applications to Biology and Medicine.
A member of the Executive Committee of the Biomedical Optics Society, Dr. Farkas also is series editor for Methods in Bioengineering (Springer). He has also been Associate Editor of Cytometry and of Molecular Imaging, on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Biomedical Optics, oemagazine, Current Analytical Chemistry and Journal of Microscopy. He has served on more than a dozen National Science Foundation panels and National Institutes of Health Study Sections. Dr. Farkas has also served on scientific advisory boards of national research centers (including Stanford University and the University of Maryland), organizations such as Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and companies.
His work was recognized with the Automated Imaging Association Award for Scientific Application (1994) and the Sylvia Sorkin Greenfield Award from the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (2002).
Dr. Farkas was trained in theoretical physics in Romania and earned his doctorate in biophysics and biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute in Israel. While at the Weizmann Institute, he received a number of honors including the Yashinsky Outstanding Graduate Student Prize, EMBO and UNESCO fellowships and the Aharon Katchalsky-Katzir Award.
He came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar with a Dr. Chaim Weizmann fellowship. He conducted research at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Farkas was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. He is fluent in six languages.
