James Fujimoto is Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a visiting professor of ophthalmology at Tufts University School of Medicine, and an adjunct professor at the Medical University of Vienna. His group and collaborators were responsible for the invention and development of optical coherence tomography (OCT). Their paper, “Optical Coherence Tomography,” published in Science in 1991, remains one of the most cited papers in the biophotonics field. Working with Carmen Puliafito and Eric Swanson, he was a cofounder of the startup company Advanced Ophthalmic Devices, which developed OCT for ophthalmic imaging and was acquired by Carl Zeiss. He also cofounded, with Eric Swanson and Mark Brezinski, LightLab Imaging, which developed cardiovascular OCT and was acquired by Goodman, Ltd. and St. Jude Medical.

In addition to publishing over 450 peer-reviewed journal articles and coediting 13 books, Dr. Fujimoto is an influential educator—numerous researchers who trained in his group are now leaders in photonics and biophotonics. He is also active in scientific service. He is a director of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), has been general cochair of the SPIE BIOS symposium since 2003, and was program and general cochair for the 2002 and 2004 Conferences on Lasers and Electro Optics (CLEO), cochair of the 2005 European Conferences on Biomedical Optics, and director of the Optical Society of America from 2000 to 2003.

He received the Zeiss Research Award in 2011, the IEEE Photonics Award in 2014, and the Optical Society of America Ives Medal in 2015. He is a co-recipient of the 2002 Rank Prize in Optoelectronics and 2012 António Champalimaud Vision Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has an honorary doctorate from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. He received his SB, SM, and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1979, 1981, and 1984.