The Lab of Fluids and Photons at the University of San Diego

Here at the University of San Diego in the Department of Physics and Biophysics we look at a number of different soft and squishy materials (some living and some not) with a whole bunch of different optical microscopy methods.

Undergraduate students should check out an opportunity to work on research projects in Mexico over the 2025 summer. Details here: https://sites.google.com/view/nsf-ires-softmatter

We recently released code for differential dynamic microscopy, an image analysis method we use in several projects. For more on that, see our PyDDM documentation site.

optical tweezers

Selene and Max using optical tweezers.

light sheet microscope in use

Ruilin You using the two-color differential dynamic microscope setup

light sheet microscope in use

Michelle Wang using one of the two light sheet microscopes we have built