Rohit Bhargava
The Power List 2021
Founder Professor and Director, Cancer Center at Illinois, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Biggest breakthrough? The biggest breakthrough in our field has been the ready availability of tunable lasers across the mid-IR spectral region. With the availability of quantum cascade lasers, a widely tunable, high intensity source became available. This technology has changed our field. It has spurred the development of new instrumentation, fast imaging, and novel capabilities, and it promises to be the basis of many more advances.
In another life… I would probably be a material scientist, focusing on specialty polymeric materials. Having joined graduate school to learn more about polymer processing and making composite materials, I instead got interested in characterizing them and the tools that we used.
