Biophotonics at the National Science Foundation and funding opportunities

The paper reports on the development of the NSF Biophotonics Program initiated in late 1999 which intends to exploit the power of photonics to advance biomedical engineering, and to bridge the gap between the NSF and NIH missions as well as impact the charters of other federal agencies. The NSF Biophotonics Program emphasizes high risk/high return multidisciplinary, exploratory studies of novel concepts in biomedical photonics. These technologies could be used for non-invasive or minimally invasive optical imaging, monitoring, and sensing of complex systems such as tissues at the cellular level and cells at the subcellular level.