Profile
Jiawen Li
- Associate Investigator
- University of Adelaide
- jiawen.li01@adelaide.edu.au
Dr Jiawen Li is an inventor and highly adaptable engineer leading the intravascular imaging program at the Institute of Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS). Her innovation has led to her being selected as Fellow of NHMRC, National Heart Foundation and L’Oréal-UNESCO. She has won numerous prestigious awards and honours (including Young Tall Poppy Science Award, Global 35 Under 35 by MIT Technology Review, Superstar of STEM, Australian Optical Society Early Career Researcher Prize, National Heart Foundation Innovation Award, and Best New Invention Award by Knowledge Commercialisation Australasia). She has also secured >$8 million competitive research funding as a chief investigator (>$3 million as the lead chief investigator CI-A, including NHMRC Ideas, Investigator and Development grants).
Jiawen and her team are developing ultrathin, flexible, multimodal fibre-optic imaging probes that will enable cross-sectional visualisation of blood vessels with high resolution, molecular contrast, and sensitivity that are not possible with any other existing technologies. This cutting-edge tool will underpin biological studies to help answer fundamental questions at cellular level of how plaques evolve, how they cause heart attacks, and how they respond to different treatment.