EKSPLA’s Senior Laser Engineer Dr. Romaldas Antanavičius is in the Photonics100 list of 2024. He was chosen among other bright photonics’ minds and innovators from all over the globe!
For the second year in a row, the Electro Optics magazine has announced the carefully crafted list, which celebrates people that drive the photonics industry forward – the innovators, the boundary-pushers, the disruptors, the out-of-the-box thinkers and the R&D rock stars. “This year, nominations came from a far wider geography than before. […] We hope it creates a compelling snapshot of the widely recognized and the less familiar. […] It’s been quite a job deciding on a final cut and it’s timely to thank the wider team at Europa Science and beyond with helping us make these difficult calls and bringing the project to life”, – say the editors.
Romaldas is Ekspla’s master of tunable wavelength lasers. One of which, for example, is about helping to save many lives. Romaldas made significant contributions to the development of PhotoSonus, a laser designed for advanced photoacoustic imaging systems to irradiate tissues and other materials. By delivering output into multiple channels, it ensures homogeneous and efficient illumination of the breast, enabling the detection of breast cancer at an early stage by identifying typical vascularity of tumors.
Romaldas also encourages the young talents at Ekspla to exceed their perceived limits. As he says, “I am interested in expanding the limits of the laser technologies and the ways they can be applied. You really have to have a creative approach in this field of science, but that is the reason I love my job.”
Two of the lasers that Romaldas helped to develop have been acknowledged by the Prism Awards committee. The new PT277-XIR laser system was one of the three finalists of the Prism Awards 2023 in the category of lasers – a common category for scientific and industrial lasers this year. The other laser – the NT200 series – won a gold medal in the category of scientific lasers in 2010.