Benoit Dawant has been named a Senior Member of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. He joins a distinguished group of international scholars honored in August at the SPIE Optics + Photonics 2024 conference in San Diego.
Dawant is a Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering and the interim chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is recognized for his expertise in medical imaging, image processing, and computer-assisted interventions. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 scientific articles that have been cited more than 20,000 times.
As the founding director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering (VISE), Dawant has been instrumental in fostering collaborations between engineers and physicians, accelerating the development of systems designed to enhance interventional processes and outcomes.
Over the past 20 years, Dawant has led efforts in the development, validation, clinical deployment, and commercialization of automatic image analysis methods and systems that facilitate surgical procedures. Notably, he directed the creation of systems to assist in the placement of deep brain stimulators for treating Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders, the placement of brain electrodes for epilepsy diagnosis, and the programming of cochlear implants used to restore hearing in profoundly deaf patients. Several systems developed in his laboratory have been commercialized and are now in routine clinical use, while others have been integrated into clinical workflows at Vanderbilt and other institutions as research clinical systems.
SPIE Senior Members are recognized for their professional experience, technical achievements, active involvement in the optics community, and significant contributions that distinguish them from their peers.
Contact: brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu