Irene Georgakoudi has been working on the use of lasers for therapeutic and diagnostic applications since her undergraduate years. She started as a physicist at Dartmouth College and continued her graduate studies in Biophysics at the University of Rochester. Her interests in spectroscopy and spectroscopic imaging using endogenous sources of contrast were founded during her postdoctoral years at the MIT Spectroscopy Lab. After working on the development of fluorescence-based in vivo flow cytometry while an Instructor at the Wellman Laboratories for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, she moved to Tufts in 2004. She is the author of several patents on the development and use of spectroscopy and imaging to characterize tissues or to detect specific populations of cells and has published numerous peer reviewed manuscripts, review articles and book chapters in these topics. She is the recipient of a Claflin Distinguished Scholar, an NSF Career, and an American Cancer Society Research Scholar award. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Optical Society of America