Hari Shroff, PhD

Hari Shroff is a Senior Group Leader in Molecular Tools and Imaging at Janelia.

Shroff received a B.S.E. in bioengineering from the University of Washington in 2001, and under the supervision of Dr. Jan Liphardt, completed his Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley in 2006. He spent the next two and a half years performing postdoctoral research in Eric Betzig’s lab at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus where his research focused on the development of photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM), an optical super-resolution technique that earned Betzig a share of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

For the next thirteen years, Shroff headed the Laboratory of High Resolution Optical Imaging at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health, working to improve fluorescence microscopy methods suited for volumetric time-lapse (‘4D’) imaging. Commercialized inventions from this period include dual-view selective plane illumination microscopy (diSPIM) and instant super-resolution microscopy (iSIM), which are now used in hundreds of laboratories around the world. Shroff recently returned to Janelia, where he continues to push the envelope in biological imaging.

Current areas of research include adaptive optics, deep learning, and the study of brain development in simple organisms.