Kamran Avanaki is currently a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Kent, United Kingdom, with an Outstanding Achievement Honor in Medical Optical Imaging and Computing in 2012. His areas of expertise are the design and development of photoacoustic imaging technology and optical coherence tomography for biomedical applications to solve critical problems in brain and skin imaging. He has received multiple research grants/fellowships including NIH R01 Bioengineering Research Grants (BRGs), the NIH R01 BRAIN Initiative: Proof of Concept Development of Early Stage Next Generation Human Brain Imaging, and the Melanoma Research Alliance Grant. He has received several other awards including Michigan Translational Research and Commercialization (MTRAC), the American Cancer Society Seed Award, The Tech Transfer Talent Network (T3N) Award, the Michigan Children’s Hospital Foundation Award, the Entrepreneurship and the Anderson Institute Award, the Richard Barber Interdisciplinary Research Award, the Albert and Goldye J. Nelson Award, and the Dean’s Diversity Fellowship. He has mentored/co-mentored more than 30 graduate students and has been awarded the Outstanding Faculty Award three times (in 2016, 2017, and 2019) at Wayne State University. He also received the Research Excellence Award and Excellence in Teaching Award in 2019 from the Engineering School at Wayne State University.