Claudia Jaffe
Organisation: Lumencor Role: Co-Founder and executive vice-president of business development Based in: Oregon, USA Education: PhD, bioanalytical chemistry
Claudia Jaffe's nomination gets right to the spirit of photonics invention: 'She took a prototype that she built in her garage and transformed it into a thriving global company with a worldwide installed base of tens of thousands of technical lighting products.' The inspiration for the first Light Engine
occurred while Jaffe was working in Silicon Valley at a startup, building lighting for commercial projection displays. She and her partner, her husband of more than 20 years, realised none of the technical lighting options available at that time addressed the demanding needs of the life sciences, namely, bright, stable, powerful, solid-state light. The impact of this lack of performance
and reliability was tangible shortcomings in the sensitivity, speed, and accuracy in the biotech instruments the lighting supports. So she decided to take on the challenge, and build better lighting herself. She and her co- founder built the first Light Engine prototype based on proprietary technology in 2006. In the 16 years since, Jaffe has helped to
define the company’s technology and secure many of its patents. She published a study “Solid state light engines for bioanalytical instruments and biomedical devices” at the Proceedings of SPIE – The International Society for Optical Engineering – in 2010. Lumencor launched new laser light
sources earlier this year and scanning the methodologies of papers in Nature and Science shows how well represented its latest products are at the lab bench. Jaffe's background includes the
development of chips for compound library screening in lab-on-a-chip devices and Q-PCR on customisable microarrays. Her education includes a doctorate in bioanalytical chemistry, from the University of Pittsburgh. She has developed, published and patented a variety of electrochemical and photoelectrochemical sensors and bioanalytical chips, for high throughput analyses employing enzymology, immunology and genomics. She also oversees technical support,
sales, marketing, and business development for Lumencor’s many microscope lighting products and scanners. Lumencor's tools integrate a proprietary mix of LEDs, light pipes and lasers and include a portfolio of its Light Engines, which are designed to help scientists perform bioanalysis and biomedical diagnostics. Light microscopy techniques are central to research in the life sciences,
spanning cell biology, neuroscience, pharmacology, genomics, biomedical engineering, microbiology, physiology and many other disciplines. Fluorescence microscopy, with its capacity for colour- encoded detection of molecular and cellular targets and imaging of living cells and organisms, is the most important of these techniques. Microscope mercury arc and metal halide light sources, while ubiquitous for many years, are encumbered by erratic performance and continual consumption of replacement bulbs. Today, they have largely been replaced by solid-state Light Engines. The 21st century demands clean, long- lived technical lighting. Lumencor's Light Engines are mercury-free and designed to last more than a decade. The company is an approved partner with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). A solid-state Light Engine is a centrally
controlled array of solid-state light sources whose outputs merge into a common optical train. The source outputs can be
activated in parallel to generate white light, or sequentially when discrete wavelengths are needed. Lumencor’s solid-state technologies
provide improvements in the quality of simple LED illumination available to both researchers and instrument manufacturers. This has enabled expansion in the capabilities of fluorescence microscopy, both in terms of sample throughput and spatial resolution and has driven the development of many new applications. The number of sources, wavelength, bandpass, optical power and mode of operation of each light source is engineered for a final product tailored to the application requirements. Solid-state light sources are inherently stable and long lived. These device designs enable application-specific configurations in a way that incandescent light sources and arc lamps cannot. You can find Jaffe online at https://lumencor. com/company/leadership/claudia-b-jaffe-phd, or
researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/ Claudia-B-Jaffe-2014315000.
2023 Photonics 100 25
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