18.06.2025 He is the co-creator of a technology that revolutionized eye diagnostics. He heads an international research center. He changed the face of Polish science when others were writing grants. Now he is celebrating a double anniversary: his 50th birthday and 25 years since the discovery of the Sd-OCT technique.
Prof. Maciej Wojtkowski, founder and director of ICTER, is turning 50. It would be hard to imagine a more symbolic moment – exactly 25 years ago, in 1999, he co-created the groundbreaking optical imaging technique of spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT), which is now a standard in the diagnosis of retinal and optic nerve diseases.
Thanks to his research, it has become possible to “look” inside the eye non-invasively, ultra-fast and extremely precisely – without a scalpel and with micrometer precision. This technology has influenced the lives of millions of patients worldwide and has established Poland’s position in the global elite of biomedical optics.
From Toruń, through Vienna and MIT – and back
During his career, Prof. Wojtkowski headed the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Institute of Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, was a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University, and collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School. Currently, as the head of ICTER, he leads a team of several dozen scientists from various fields, researching the next generation of methods for imaging biological structures and dynamic processes in the eye.
He is a laureate of the Foundation for Polish Science Award, a member of the Academia Europaea, the author of about 10 patents – including the clinical prototype of Sd-OCT – and about 260 publications, including over 130 in leading journals. His works have already been cited thousands of times, which confirms his position as a leader in global medical optics. But apart from that, he also has a talent for inspiring young scientists and infecting them with his passion for the physics of light.
50 is just a number. But what a number!
“I don’t have time to think about age. I have the impression that the best research is still ahead of me,” jokes Prof. Wojtkowski in the corridors, between another seminar and an interference measurement.
His birthday was celebrated symbolically at ICTER, but with recognition for the role he played in creating a place that today sets directions in research on vision and medical optics.
