Chris Schaffer
Associate Professor
Biomedical Engineering
College of Engineering - Ithaca
Interests: In Vivo Imaging, Inflammation, Neurodegeneration, Nonlinear Microscopy, Vascular
My lab develops and uses advanced optical techniques to observe and manipulate in vivo biological systems, with the goal of constructing a microscopic-scale understanding of normal and disease-state physiological processes in the central nervous system. The scientific questions we address center principally on elucidating the cellular-scale interactions that lead to brain cell dysfunction in neurological diseases. We develop novel optical methods that enable us to attack these problems in ways not previously possible, and because many of our research questions involve interactions among different components of an organism we focus almost exclusively on in vivo approaches. We study animal models of a variety of neurological diseases, including microvascular stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, spinal cord injury, and epilepsy. In the majority of these studies, the role of immune and inflammatory cells is central.
