Distinguished ProfessorDayong Jin

The ability to detect, quantify, and localise target cells and molecules quickly and with high accuracy and precision is fundamental to many areas of modern biomedical research and industry: from understanding sub-cellular processes and biochemical pathways to early detection in clinical settings.

Professor Jin's research is directed at the grand challenge of achieving super-resolution imaging of single molecules and live cells in their physiological environment. The goal is to watch subcellular compartments at work and understand the nanoscale world inside living cells. This will provide a novel toolkit, analogous to Google’s ‘street view’, that will enable researchers to ‘drop down’ and observe the details of subcellular ‘live traffic’, decode the complexities of life science machinery and detect health issues before they become critical.

Long-term functional navigation in living cells requires nanoscopic probes to emit light in unexpected ways: very efficiently, very intensely, by flashing, or by upconversion, and being responsive to the local physiological environment and biomarker interactions. His research since 2012 has created pioneering advances in optical physics for up-converting emissions of nanophotonics materials, enabling their transformation into cellular probes and sensors with single molecule sensitivities. In parallel to the developments of molecular probes, Professor Jin has invented new modalities and devised a series of instruments to acquire high-dimensional and super-resolution details of living cells.