Webinar Series

Pauline Non is the Engineering Manager at Thorlabs Imaging Systems. She joined Thorlabs in 2010 and has become the go-to resource for understanding an imaging system from the ground up. Pauline holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Physics from Johns Hopkins University's Engineering for Professionals program. 

Craig Szymanski is a Life Science Applications Specialist at Thorlabs Imaging Systems. He has 18 years of microscopy experience with a variety of imaging modalities, including optical, electron, and x-ray. He provides training and support for customers as well as Thorlabs employees on confocal, multiphoton, and other imaging platforms.

Over his career, Bradley Alger, Professor Emeritus of Physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), has published over 100 research articles, including the discovery of retrograde signaling in the mammalian brain, which is mediated by endogenous cannabinoids, the brain’s own marijuana. He is also the author of Defense of the Scientific Hypothesis: From Reproducibility Crisis to Big Data, a book published by Oxford University Press in 2019.  After completing his undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, Alger went on to obtain his doctorate in Research and Experimental Psychology from Harvard University in 1977. As Roger Nicoll's first postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, Alger performed electrophysiological studies on the regulation of inhibitory synaptic transmission in in vitro hippocampal slices. After UCSF, Alger joined the Department of Physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) and remained there until retiring from active duties as Professor in 2014. 

Dr. Spagnolo serves as the director of the PolySense Lab, a joint research
lab formed by Thorlabs and the Technical University of Bari. Within that role, he guides a team devoted to the development and implementation of novel gas sensing techniques and the realization of highly sensitive trace-gas sensors. Spagnolo obtained his Ph.D. in physics in 1994 from the University of Bari and worked as a researcher for the National Institute of the Physics of Matter (INFM) from 1997 to 1999. Since 2004, he has been at the Technical University of Bari, formerly as an assistant and associate professor and, starting in 2018, as Full Professor of Applied Physics. In 2019, he became Vice-Rector of the Technical University of Bari, deputy to Technology Transfer. He is also a “Hundred Talent” visiting professor at Shanxi University in Taiyuan (China).

Prof. Spagnolo’s research activities have been documented by more than 210 Scopus publications and include three filed patents. He has given more than 50 invited/keynote presentations at international conferences and workshops. Prof. Spagnolo serves as a reviewer of photonics and sensing-related projects for EU-COST, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Austrian Science Fund, Dutch Research Council (NWO), and as the Italian minister of Research and Italian Minister of Defense. He is editor of Sensors (MPDI), Applied Science (MPDI), and Journal of Sensors (Hindawi) and guest editor of Photoacoustics (Elsevier). Prof. Spagnolo is a program committee member of several SPIE and OSA conferences, a fellow member of SPIE, and a senior member of the OSA.

In his current role, Scott Domingue oversees Thorlabs’ engineering
group responsible for designing and engineering laser systems to suit the specific needs of the life science community. Having previously worked at KMLabs, whose Yb-fiber-based laser products are now a part of the Thorlabs product family, he developed a 3-photon laser system, the Y-Fi™ Optical Parametric Amplifier (OPA). Scott's work bridges the gap between the technologies developed in laser and biophysics laboratories and the real-world photonics needs of the life science community, with an emphasis on ultrafast imaging and spectroscopy. Scott holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Colorado State University, where he also worked as a Post-Doctoral Researcher developing a visible, two-color fs laser system along with a transient absorption microscope.

Martin Parker is responsible for the development of Thorlabs' cameras,
camera software, and related accessories. Involved in electronic imaging his entire career, Martin started off as a member of the Eastman Kodak Company research labs. While there, he developed image sensor noise analysis hardware, designed imaging subsystems for a number of products including photographic print and motion picture film scanners, and led the development of an encryption-based image authentication product as well as an early prototype JPEG2000 encoder for cameras. Martin then joined DVC company, a manufacturer of scientific digital cameras, as engineering manager, where he led a rapid expansion of the camera product line before DVC was acquired by Thorlabs in 2011. Martin holds an MSEE from the University of Rochester and a BSEE from the University at Buffalo.