Elizabeth M. C. Hillman

Education Hillman studied physics at University College London, and graduated with a combined B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in 1998. She earned her PhD in Medical Physics and Bioengineering in 2002. During her PhD, she used optical tomography to image biological tissue.

Career Hillman joined Massachusetts General Hospital as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2003. She was appointed assistant professor at Columbia University in 2006. She licensed this Dynamic Contrast molecular imaging technique to CRi, now PerkinElmer. In 2008, she was awarded the Columbia Rodriguez Junior Faculty Award. In 2010, she was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to study in vivo Interventional Microscopy. She has explored several optical imaging techniques for biomedical research. She has received over thirty large grants to support her research.

In 2017, Hillman began to work at Columbia's Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. She identified that the vascular endothelium is important in regulation of blood flow in the brain. She has written for Scientific American. She was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2017. She has developed tools for high speed imaging of the activity in the whole brain. Hillman pioneered Swept, Confocally-Aligned Planar Excitation (SCAPE) microscopy, which combines light-sheet microscopy and laser scanning confocal microscopy. The technique uses a single objective lens to excite and detect fluorescence from a sample. She has also developed laminar optical tomography and advanced applications of two-photon microscopy.

Awards and honors 2007, Wallace H Coulter Foundation Early Career Award 2007, Human Frontier of Science Program Young Investigator Award 2018, SPIE Biophotonics Technology Innovator Award