Aaron Goldfain is physicist in the Surface and Interface Metrology Group in Gaithersburg, MD. He is interested in the interactions of light with surfaces and particles and in developing quantitative, label-free imaging methods.
He is currently building a database of the bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDF) of materials in the UV/VIS/NIR range. He is also developing methods for acquiring accurate hyperspectral microscopy data and is developing new light-scattering-based measurement techniques to characterize viral gene delivery vectors. He is a member of the Sensor Science Division's Optical Properties of Materials focus program and maintains an instrument for measuring the diffuse optical properties of materials.
He started at NIST as an NRC Postdoc in the Molecular and Bio-Photonics Group in Boulder, CO. There, he investigated photoacoustic imaging methods and optical methods for ultrasound detection. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University where he used interferometric optical microscopy to study the assembly and disassembly of viruses.