Charcot Marie Tooth Disease - CMT Disease - Hereditary Neuropathy

Vice Chairman and Professor, Department of Surgery
Director, Minimally Invasive Surgical Technologies Institute
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Daniel L. Farkas was trained in Theoretical Physics in Romania, and holds a Ph.D. in Biophysics and Biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, where he received a number of honors (Yashinsky Outstanding Graduate Student Prize, EMBO and UNESCO fellowships, Aharon Katchalsky-Katzir Award). He came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar (also holding a Dr. Chaim Weizmann fellowship), conducted research at UC San Diego and Univ. of Washington, Seattle, and was also a Fulbright lecturer at UC Berkeley. Having lived in several countries, he is fluent in six languages.
After junior faculty appointments in the US and at the Weizmann Institute, and a brief foray into the high-tech industry, he settled at Carnegie Mellon University as Associate Director and then Director of the Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology (1992-2002), a National Science and Technology Center that won the Smithsonian Award for Science in 1996. Additionally, in 1998 he joined the University of Pittsburgh where he held positions as Professor Bioengineering and Pathology, Director of the BioImaging Laboratories, as well as core faculty appointments in the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine and the Univ. of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. He was (1995-2005) also Associate Director of the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative, a regional non-profit organization, recently named the National Tissue Engineering Center. Currently, in addition to his main position at Cedars-Sinai, he is Research Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the Univ. of Southern California, and Adjunct Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Farkas’s scientific interests center on the investigation of the living state with light, for uses in biology, biotechnology, bioengineering and medicine. Optical bioimaging and biophotonics (particularly by automated, high-resolution microscopy, spectral imaging, coherence-based methods and endoscopy) are the main technology areas currently pursued in his labs, the application fields ranging from molecular and developmental biology to transplantation immunology, neurosciences, cardiology and tissue engineering. This work was described in about 200 publications, and supported by more than $50M dollars in peer-reviewed funding. Minimally invasive surgery, the Operating Room of the Future, innovative oncology research, and regenerative medicine, pursued at the mesoscopic level constitute his current focus; in these application domains, his group’s ability to monitor events with high spatio-temporal resolution and non-invasively in vivo significantly increased relevance, in studies of 3-D tissue architecture and physiology, cancer detection, stem cell engraftment, tissue oxygenation, transplant rejection and cardiovascular intervention.
Dr. Farkas has chaired more than twenty international scientific meetings, including the United Engineering Foundation Conference on Advances in Optics for Biotechnology, Medicine and Surgery and the Keystone Symposium on Optical Bioimaging: Applications to Biology and Medicine. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Biomedical Optics Society, and series editor for Methods in Bioengineering (Springer). He was/is also Associate Editor of Cytometry and of Molecular Imaging, on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Biomedical Optics, oemagazine, Current Analytical Chemistry and Journal of Microscopy, and has served on more than a dozen NSF panels and NIH Study Sections, and on scientific advisory boards of national research centers (Stanford Univ., U. Maryland) and organizations (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), as well as companies. His work was recognized with the Automated Imaging Association Award for Scientific Application (1994) and the Sylvia Sorkin Greenfield Award from the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (2002).
Dr. Farkas was also involved in a number of successful high-tech startups, and is founder and chairman of ChromoDynamics, Inc. and of Spectral Molecular Imaging, Inc.