Dr Thangavel Thevar is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering at the University of Aberdeen. He graduated from the same university with a First Class Honours in Electrical Engineering in 1989 and with a PhD in Laser Engineering in 1993. Prior to joining University of Aberdeen in 2005, he had about 10 years of industrial R&D experience in the USA in solid-state laser development and holographic applications. During this time, he developed alexandrite lasers, ruby holographic lasers and Raman converters (US patent 8,494,012 B2). He also worked on several US government contracts to develop non-destructive inspection methods for military aircraft and the space shuttle. In addition, he spent some time in NASA Langley Research Centre on sabbatical working with Dr Norman Barnes to develop diode pumped Thulium YALO lasers. Thanga’s current research include digital holography for imaging of marine plankton and micro-particles; Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) for subsea applications; and laser-based instrumentation. In 2020, he led a team of researchers to develop a state-of-the-art ultracompact underwater holographic camera (named weeHoloCam) for imaging microorganisms (https://www.abdn.ac.uk/news/15104/). Weighing just 3.5 kg, this is the lightest and most compact system of its kind. It can image 240 ml/s and can continuously record up to 200,000 holograms. Added to the system is a rapid hologram processor and an AI based image classifier to group images.