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MICHAEL W. BERNS RECEIVES LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Michael W. Berns, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Professor, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Developmental and Cell Biology, and Surgery, and co-founder (with Arnold O. Beckman, 1900-2004) of the Beckman Laser Institute at UCI, was awarded the 2006 Biomedical Optics Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual meeting of SPIE's International Symposium on Biomedical Optics (BiOS) held in January 2006 at San Jose, California.
Before an audience of approximately 500 engineers and biomedical scientists, Dr. R. Rox Anderson, Director of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Harvard University, presented the award to Dr. Berns "for his contributions to the development and growth of laser microbeam technology, a major step towards establishing new tools for understanding laser interactions with biological tissues, which have resulted in significant improvements in diagnosis and treatment of disease."
Additionally, Dr. Anderson remarked that Michael is generally considered the "father of laser microbeams," having started his work as early as 1969 with publication of a seminal paper in Nature magazine describing how the laser can be used to perform subcellular surgery on chromosomes. Over the past 35 years, Dr. Berns has published over 400 articles and written and/or edited six books that have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Serbo-Croatian.
Dr. Berns joined the faculty of the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology at UCI in 1972 where he first served as departmental vice-chair and then Chair. In 1994, he received the UCI medal, the highest honor awarded at the University of California campus. In addition to being the co-founder of the Beckman Laser Institute, he was the founding director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering at UCI which is now the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Dr. Berns was recently recognized as being in the top 5% nationally of NIH funded scientists for total funds received over the past 25 years, as well as in the top 20% nationally for patents awarded to medical school faculty who have been funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
Following presentation of the lifetime achievement award, Dr. Berns presented a lecture entitled, "Laser Scissors and Tweezers in Space and Time," a summary of the past, present and future research of his students and collaborators.