Stephen Boppart

About

Stephen Boppart is a Professor and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), with appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bioengineering, the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. His Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory focuses on developing novel optical biomedical diagnostic and imaging technologies and translating these into clinical applications. His primary research areas include biomedical imaging, biophotonics, image-guided surgery, intravital microscopy, lasers in medicine and biology, Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), optical diagnostics for cancer, point-of-care diagnostics, and primary care imaging. Prof. Boppart received his Ph.D. in Medical and Electrical Engineering from MIT and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, with specialty training in Internal Medicine. He has published over 475 publications, delivered more than 1000 presentations, and holds over 55 patents related to optical biomedical imaging technology. Recognized as one of the Top 100 Young Innovators by MIT Technology Review, he has received numerous awards including the Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award, the Hans Sigrist Prize, the IEEE Technical Achievement Award, and the SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award. He has co-founded four start-up companies to commercialize his optical technologies and is a member of the National Academy of…

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Computer Science
• Biology
• Oncology
• Cancer research
• Biochemistry
• Emergency medicine
• Medical emergency
• Simulation

Selected publications

• Large-scale tumor-associated collagen signatures identify high-risk breast cancer patients

  Theranostics · 2021 · 126 citations

  = 264) collected from a different clinical center. Results: TACS1-8 model alone competed favorably with all reported models in predicting disease-free survival (AUC: 0.838, [0.800-0.872]; 0.827, [0.779-0.868]; 0.807, [0.754-0.853] in the three cohorts) and stratifying low- and high-risk patients (HR 7.032, [4.869-10.158]; 6.846, [4.370-10.726], 4.423, [2.917-6.708]). The combination of these factors with the TACS-score into a nomogram model further improved the prognosis (AUC: 0.865, [0.829-0.89…

  PublisherDOI

• Emergency ventilator for COVID-19

  PLoS ONE · 2020 · 45 citations

  The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the world in 2020 by spreading at unprecedented rates and causing tens of thousands of fatalities within a few months. The number of deaths dramatically increased in regions where the number of patients in need of hospital care exceeded the availability of care. Many COVID-19 patients experience Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), a condition that can be treated with mechanical ventilation. In response to the need for mechanical ventilators, designed and t…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Cholesterol Metabolite 27HC Increases Secretion of Extracellular Vesicles Which Promote Breast Cancer Progression

  Endocrinology · 2021 · 42 citations

  Cholesterol has been implicated in the clinical progression of breast cancer, a disease that continues to be the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women. Previous work has identified the cholesterol metabolite 27-hydroxycholesterol (27HC) as a major mediator of the effects of cholesterol on breast tumor growth and progression. 27HC can act as an estrogen receptor (ER) modulator to promote the growth of ERα+ tumors, and as a liver X receptor (LXR) ligand in myeloid immune cells to establish an im…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Consensus guidelines for cellular label-free optical metabolic imaging: ensuring accuracy and reproducibility in metabolic profiling

  Journal of Biomedical Optics · 2025-11-11 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Significance: Cellular metabolism plays a central role in health and disease, making its study critical for advancing diagnostics and therapies. Label-free optical metabolic imaging using endogenous fluorescence from reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (phosphate) [NAD(P)H] and flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD) provides nondestructive, high-resolution insights into metabolic function and heterogeneity from the sub-cellular to the tissue level. Standardized approaches are essential to ensur…

  PublisherDOI

• Defining Biological Variability, Analytical Precision and Quantitative Biophysiochemical Characterization of Human Urinary Extracellular Vesicles

  Journal of Extracellular Vesicles · 2025-05-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT The magnitude of combined analytical errors of urinary extracellular vesicle (uEV) preparation and measurement techniques (CV A ) has not been thoroughly investigated to determine whether it exceeds biological variations. We utilized technical replicates of human urine to assess the repeatability of uEV concentration and size measurements by nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) following differential velocity centrifugation (DC), silicon carbide, or polyethylene glycol uEV isolation met…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R21CA115536

  NIH · $330k · 2009

• NIH Grant R44CA165436

  NIH · $2.2M · 2017

• Imaging tumor microenvironment by Optical Fiber-Tethered Simultaneous Lifetime-resolved Autofluorescence-Multiharmonic (OFT-SLAM) microscopy

  NIH · $1.6M · 2019–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Eric J. Chaney

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  251 shared

• Mark E. Brezinski

  Brigham and Women's Hospital

  234 shared

• Marina Marjanović

  Singidunum University

  222 shared

• James G. Fujimoto

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  206 shared

• Costas Pitris

  University of Cyprus

  195 shared

• Haohua Tu

  142 shared

• Darold R. Spillman

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  138 shared

• Brett E. Bouma

  105 shared

Labs

• Prof. Boppart's LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Bioengineering

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1992

• M.S., Bioengineering

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1988

• B.S., Engineering Physics

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1985

Awards & honors

• Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award from Optica
• Hans Sigrist Prize in the field of Diagnostic Laser Medicine
• IEEE Technical Achievement Award
• SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award
• Top 100 Young Innovators by MIT Technology Review magazine

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