The members of the Wellman Center Career Development and Promotions Committee (CDAP), Tayyaba Hasan, Brett Bouma, Bobby Redmond, Gary Tearney and Andy Yun are pleased to announce the promotion of Nicola Martino, PhD to the rank of Instructor at Harvard Medical School effective October 1, 2026.
Dr. Martino received his PhD in Physics from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and joined Prof. Seok-Hyun Yun's laboratory at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine in 2015. At Wellman, Dr. Martino has played a leading role in the development of laser particles (LPs), miniature semiconductor lasers that can be used as optical tags to uniquely identify and track individual cells. In a study published in Nature Photonics (2019), “Wavelength-encoded laser particles for massively multiplexed cell tagging,” he demonstrated how these particles could enable large-scale cellular identification through their distinct emission wavelengths. More recently, he led the development of combinatorial optical barcoding, in which multiple LPs are combined to generate millions of unique cellular identifiers, as reported in Light: Science & Applications (2025). These optical barcodes can be read repeatedly and non-destructively, allowing individual cells to be identified across multiple measurements and experimental platforms. LP technology has also been applied to high-dimensional flow cytometry, as demonstrated in Nature Biomedical Engineering (2024), and has contributed to the establishment of LASE Innovation Inc., a startup dedicated to its commercialization, where he serves as a scientific consultant. The work has led to two patent applications on laser particle technology.
Dr. Martino’s current research focuses on extending optical barcoding to longitudinal single-cell analysis. He is developing a new generation of particles that integrate multiple lasers into a single structure, allowing the barcode to be inherited intact through cell division. This approach enables the tracking of individual cell lineages over time and the linking of measurements from microscopy and flow cytometry with downstream single-cell sequencing. In an ongoing collaboration with Prof. Galit Lahav’s group at Harvard Medical School, he is applying these technologies to investigate how the temporal dynamics of p53 signaling relate to gene expression and treatment resistance in cancer cells. He is now developing a platform for long-term tracking and high-content profiling of individual cells, with an initial focus on the progression of cellular senescence."
Please join us in congratulating Nicola on this well-deserved promotion.

Dr Rox Anderson earned the inaugural award in this category from the American Academy of Dermatology and will be recognized at a ceremony in 2027 at their Annual Meeting in San Francisco

The members of the Wellman Center Career Development and Promotions (CDAP) Committee are delighted to announce the promotion of Martin Villiger to the rank of Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. Martin is now a Team Associate Professor in Prof. Brett Bouma’s team.

Martin received his PhD in Photonics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he previously completed an MSc in Microengineering. His dissertation research focused on microscopy and optical coherence tomography (OCT) under the joint mentorship of Professors Theo Lasser and Rainer Leitgeb. He joined Prof. Brett Bouma’s group as a postdoctoral fellow in 2010, was promoted to Instructor in 2013, and to Assistant Professor in 2018.