Dr. Jiawen Li received her BS degree in Optical Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2010, and her PhD degree in Biomedical Engineering from University of California Irvine in 2015. Her research interests include optical coherence tomography (OCT), imaging+sensing fibre-optic probes, Doppler OCT, multimodality imaging and ultra-thin endoscopes.

Her PhD research focused on the development of highly novel multimodal miniaturized fibre-optic imaging probes, where they fully integrated two or more complementary imaging modalities in one single unit.
After the completion of her PhD, She joined University of Western Australian (UWA) to lead the development of a flexible fibre-optic needle probe. Extended from this project, she proposed an innovative fibre-optic probe design that can provide co-localized imaging and aspiration. This was the cornerstone idea of an awarded grant (as the lead CI) and a journal publication (as the first and corresponding author, which also won IPAS Best ECR Paper Award).
In April 2016, she moved with her supervisor, Prof Robert McLaughlin, to University of Adelaide (UoA) to establish their new lab. They conducted a successful pilot clinical trial of our smart brain needle probes in 11 patients undergoing neurosurgery in late 2016. The tiny probe lets surgeons 'see' at-risk blood vessels as they insert the biopsy needle, allowing them to avoid causing potentially fatal bleeds. The results have been highlighted by ‘making a difference: outcomes of ARC supported research’.
Since 2017, she began to establish her own independent research area by actively applying for grants and delivering them. 1) As the lead CI of an awarded pilot project grant, she was able to investigate and demonstrate the first single-fibre based fibre-optic probe that can conduct imaging and temperature sensing simultaneously. 2) Strategically using the funding of her women’s research excellence award, she developed my unique expertise of 3D printing freeform micro-optics for fibre-optic probes (first-author journal paper under in-depth review by Scientific Reports) and strengthened her collaborative work on developing biocompatible fibre coatings. 3) Combining her unique expertise in fibre-optic probes and experience in research translation, she partner with Miniprobes Pty Ltd, a high-tech Australian start-up company, to translate our research outcomes to products suitable for industrial applications. She was recently awarded South Australian Government funding ‘Photonics Catalyst Program’, to support a University-Industry translational research project to develop fibre-optic imaging probes for the non-destructive testing market.