Paul Bassan

Paul is a graduate physicist who completed his BSc in Physics at the University of Warwick in 2006. He then went on to do an MSc in Medical Physics at the University of Manchester. In October 2007, Paul joined the Gardner group, specialising in Synchrotron fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (SR-FTIR) of single biological cells with the aim of understanding fundamental physics. Most of Paul’s FTIR measurements are done in collaboration with Synchrotron beamlines such as the SRS Daresbury (U.K.), the Soleil Synchrotron (France) and future work at Elettra (Italy).

Single cell FTIR spectroscopy is currently limited by scattering processes that occur, namely Mie scattering. The effect of this scattering is that subtle biochemical information from the single cells is distorted by large sinusoidal baseline lines affecting peak heights and positions. The ‘dispersion artefact/anomalous dispersion’ in FTIR spectra is another of Paul’s focuses as it is also a common problem reducing the quality of affected spectra.

Paul is currently working with Achim Kohler of Nofima Mat in Norway to implement the newly understood scattering physics/dynamics into the previous Mie Scattering EMSC (extended multiplicative signal correction) program.