Randy Bartels is chasing innovation in imaging technology while building collaborations with researchers across the biological sciences.
So he should fit in nicely in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, whose faculty and students routinely work with colleagues across the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus to develop new tools for the research lab and the clinic.
Bartels, an expert in creating technologies that shed light on unseen worlds in biology, joins BME and the Morgridge Institute for Research in summer 2023. He’s spent the past 20 years on the faculty of Colorado State University, specializing in the development of light microscopy and laser technology for applications such as ultra-deep imaging of tissues and vastly improved resolution of cell populations.
“I’ve been working in the space of biomedical imaging for more than 15 years, but Morgridge and UW-Madison will offer an opportunity to work with a wider range of collaborators in biology,” says Bartels, who will initially serve as a visiting faculty member in BME before joining full time in 2024. “I think true innovation has to be collaborative, built on conversations across disciplines and lots of trial and error. I’m really excited to work with biologists who want to push what we’re capable of imaging.”
Two current Bartels research projects have captured the attention of the “Frontiers of Imaging” program at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). In 2020, Bartels received CZI support for a project to image more deeply into tissue by developing ways to suppress scattered light and increase resolution. And in 2022, Bartels partnered on a CZI project to develop a laser technology that can illuminate large populations or regions of cells, at much faster speed and higher resolution than conventional techniques.
Bartels has earned high honors for his work. He was awarded the Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Sloan Research Fellowship in physics, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award and a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering.
A self-described “science nerd” in his youth, Bartels was a first-generation undergraduate student when he attended Oklahoma State University in the early 1990s. His curiosity about research was helped along by his exposure to an early iteration of the internet called “Gopher,” created by the University of Minnesota. Long before search engines became ubiquitous in modern life, Bartels jumped on Gopher (designed mostly for academic researchers) to explore what summer research projects might be open to undergraduates.
The search led him to a summer research opportunity at the Ames Research Lab at Iowa State University, where he worked on semiconductor thin film growth. The next year, he landed a summer research gig at the University of Michigan’s Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. There he met the scientists who would become his PhD mentors.
While Bartels’ academic training is almost exclusively in physics and engineering, today he is most at home at the intersection between physical sciences and biology.
“These days, I spend a lot more time reading biology papers than I do physics papers, because I want to understand some of the problems that we really need to solve,” he says. “And also, I’m not naive enough to think that I come in with a technology, and it’s just going to solve problems on its own.”
One class of experiments Bartels plans to pursue in Madison is developing optical correlative imaging with cryo-EM and MRI. In the case of cryo-EM, he will exploit unique properties of his new fluorescent super resolution imaging technique. In particular, the microscopy can image large sample volumes, even when optical aberrations are present.
Bartels is excited to develop innovative new biomedical microscope technologies that will open new lines of inquiry by being able to quantitatively address questions that cannot be systematically studied with current technologies.
A version of this story was originally posted by the Morgridge Institute for Research.