Mark C. Pierce

Faculty Fellow, Bioengineering

Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Medical School / Massachusetts General Hospital (2001-2005)
Ph.D., Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, UK (2001)
B.Sc., Physics (Hons.), University of Manchester (1997)

Bio Sketch

Mark Pierce works with Professor Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Assistant Professor Tomasz Tkaczyk at Rice University and clinicians in the Texas Medical Center to develop and apply optical technologies for detection and diagnosis of disease. He has been a faculty fellow at Rice since 2005, and has built novel diagnostic platform technologies for detection of infectious diseases in low-resource settings and constructed optical imaging systems that enable early cancer detection through in vivo microscopy.

After completing his doctoral research on the mechanisms of interaction between infrared laser radiation and biological tissue, he was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School/ Massachusetts General Hospital (2001-2005) where he worked with doctors Johannes de Boer, Brett Bouma, and Guillermo Tearney on development and clinical translation of time- and spectral-domain optical coherence tomography systems.

Pierce is the author or co-author of 30 journal publications, several book chapters, and more than 50 conferences presentations and proceedings. His is also a 2009 recipient of the Excellence in Advising Award by the Office of Academic Advising at Rice University.

Research Statement

Molecular imaging has rapidly emerged as a discipline with the potential to impact fundamental biomedical research and clinical practice. Within this field, optical imaging offers several unique capabilities based on the ability of cells and tissues to affect changes in the properties of visible and near-infrared light. Beyond endogenous optical properties, the development of molecularly targeted contrast agents enables disease-specific morphologic and biochemical processes to be labeled with unique optical signatures. Optical imaging systems can then provide real-time visualization of pathophysiology at spatial scales from the subcellular to whole organ levels.

Pierce’s current research efforts focus on the design, construction, and implementation of optical instrumentation for detection and diagnosis of disease. He is engaged in projects using confocal and wide-field microscopy to resolve cellular features in vivo, and couple these systems with low-magnification, large area screening devices. His other primary area of research involves development of optical detection platforms for in vitro diagnostics, using both imaging and point-sampling approaches.