Education

• Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania

Lab

• Biophotonics

Research Interests

• Biomedical Optics
• Bio-instrumentation
• Optics and Photonics

Professor Ranji received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007, where her doctoral research focused on fluorescence spectroscopy and imaging of cardiovascular diseases. She subsequently joined the Sanford Burnham Institute for Medical Research/UC San Diego Bioengineering as a postdoctoral associate, studying stem cell differentiation for cardiac repair. From 2009 to 2020, she was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee before joining Florida Atlantic University in 2020. She is now a Professor in both Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and serves as Associate Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Professor Ranji’s overarching research goal is to enable early, quantitative disease diagnosis, translate benchtop technologies into clinical applications, and assess the efficacy of emerging therapies. She closely collaborates with medical school scientists to advance translational biomedical research. A central focus of Professor Ranji’s work is the real-time monitoring of mitochondrial redox state, which has the potential to provide clinicians with a direct means of detecting the onset and progression of organ dysfunction at the bedside. Using custom-designed optical tools, Professor Ranji has investigated redox state and energy homeostasis in organs including the eye, lung, and kidney, both ex vivo and longitudinally in vivo.