Dr. Seemantini Nadkarni is an Associate Professor at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School with over 20 years of experience in innovating and translating cutting-edge optical technologies that bridge fundamental science and clinical application. She directs the Laboratory for Optical Micromechanics, which specializes in developing novel tools and approaches that access and visualize the micromechanical landscape of tissue to advance diagnostics in hematology, cardiology, cancer research and orthopedics.

Her team has pioneered Laser Speckle Rheology (LSR), a novel imaging approach that measures tissue viscoelasticity at microscale resolution, a breakthrough platform successfully applied in living animals and patient samples to uncover mechanical signatures in a variety of tissue pathologies.  Building on this, her team developed SHEAR (Speckle rHEologicAl micRoscope), a new microscopy approach enabling detailed micromechanical imaging of tissue samples that provides unique insights into tissue biomechanics and disease progression, applied notably to cancer and osteoarthritis research. Leveraging these innovations, her laboratory invented iCoagLAB, a rapid, point-of-care blood coagulation diagnostic requiring just a few drops of blood to deliver critical actionable results within minutes. The iCoagLAB platform is being commercialized by Coalesenz Inc., a company Dr. Nadkarni founded, with the goal of preventing life-threatening bleeding in hospitalized patients.

Holding 67 issued and pending patents on LSR, coagulation profiling and catheter engineering, Dr. Nadkarni’s research lab is funded by the NIH, Department of Defense, and industry. Her research program combines fundamental research with entrepreneurial vision to translate innovative optical tools into clinically impactful technologies poised to transform patient care and generate significant market value.