Research Interests:

Research Interests

Dr. Mitra’s research interests include the interaction of short pulse lasers with scattering absorbing media such as tissues, ocean water and clouds for non-invasive detection. The applications include optical tomography for detection of tumors in tissues, detection of schools of fish and landmines in ocean water, detection of defects in materials such as debonding in thermal protection tiles, and remote sensing of lightning through clouds. Dr. Mitra also uses ultra-short pulse lasers for minimally invasive therapeutic applications such as ablation of tumors, non-thermal dental ablation, and intrastromal refractive surgery. Dr. Mitra is also working on the design of fiber-optic based nano-probes for precise delivery of laser light and for probing desired cellular organelles and study the mechanism of light interaction during low-level laser irradiations of tissues. The numerical aspect of the research interests include solution of transient radiative transport equation for analyzing short pulse laser transport through participating media and development of hyperbolic heat conduction models for determining the temperature distribution in laser irradiated tissue with blood perfusion. Dr. Mitra has also interest in various energy systems and applications such as study of efficiency of solar collectors & PV systems, and development of nanomaterial polymer based light weight high-efficiency photovoltaic cells. Dr. Mitra has a patent (US Patent # 6,847,700) related to the short pulse x-ray irradiation technology for therapeutic applications. He also has a patent pending (US 2007/0232931 A1) dealing with a time-resolved optical tomography system using short pulse laser for cancer diagnostics.

Current Research

Optical tomography system using short pulse laser for early lung cancer detection (Florida Department of Health and Florida Photonics Center of Excellence) Tumor ablation using short pulse laser (Raydiance Inc. and U.S. Food and Drug Administration) Non-thermal dental ablation using ultra-short pulsed laser (Raydiance Inc.) Cellular interrogation using fiberoptic nanobiosensors (National Science Foundation and Florida Space Grant Consortium) Study of optical tomography for biomedical imaging of tissues using short pulse lasers (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) Transient radiative transfer modeling and experiments with short pulse lasers (NSF/Sandia National Laboratory) Non-destructive detection of thermal tile systems debonding using short pulse laser (Florida Space Grant Consortium-NASA) Landmine detection in shallow water using pulsed laser (Northrop Grumman) Temperature dependent optical properties of thin films (Florida Solar Energy Center) Nanomaterial polymer based light weight high efficiency photovoltaic cells (Solar Flex, Inc & Florida Space Grant Consortium) Novel auxiliary mirror drive mechanism for photovoltaic cells (Florida Solar Energy Center) Design and develop new experiments to update and expand the department’s Heat Transfer Laboratory