The application of optical imaging to cancer diagnosis will be the focus of the annual Gentile Lectureship presented in conjunction with Homecoming Weekend at Hope College.

Dr. Brett Bouma, a 1986 Hope graduate who is a professor at Harvard Medical School and a physicist at Massachusetts General Hospital, will present the address "Advances in Optical Imaging and Translation into Clinical Medicine" on Friday, Oct. 3, at 3:30 p.m. in the Maas Center auditorium.

The public is invited.  Admission is free.

Bouma is an associate professor of dermatology and health sciences and technology at Harvard Medical School, and an associate physicist with the Wellman Laboratories for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.

His research interests are primarily focused on the development and validation of new optical methods for disease control.  His talk will discuss the techniques and their potential to enable clinicians to detect cancerous changes earlier, and thus for cancer to be treated sooner in its development and therefore with a greater chance of success.

Bouma graduated from Hope in 1986 with a physics major.  He completed his Master of Science degree in physics at Michigan State University in 1988 and his doctorate in physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993.

The Gentile Interdisciplinary Lectureship at Hope was established in 2005 by faculty colleagues, former students and friends of Dr. James Gentile. Gentile joined the Hope faculty in 1976 and served as dean for the natural sciences from 1988 to 2005, when he became president of Research Corporation, a private foundation in Tucson, Ariz., that supports basic research in the physical sciences.

The Maas Center is located at 264 Columbia Ave., on Columbia Avenue at 11th Street.