11/13/2026
By Amanda Vozzo

Alexey Yamilov, professor in the Department of Physics at Missouri University of Science and Technology, will give a talk on “A unified approach to wave tomography in radar, seismic, ultrasound, and optical imaging.”

  • Date: Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2026
  • Time: 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
  • Location: Olsen 503

Abstract

Ground-penetrating radar, spaceborne radar tomography, seismic imaging, medical ultrasound, and optical tomography of biological tissue perform, in essence, the same task. A wave is sent into an opaque medium, its ‘echo’ is recorded at the boundary, and the interior is to be inferred from the record. These areas largely developed separately, each with its own reconstruction methods and its own catalog of sensitivity kernels, the objects that tell an imaging algorithm how a specific change inside the medium alters the signal at the detector. I will show that a common underlying wave physics makes this entire catalog collapse into just two classes. The result holds from the nearly ballistic regime of radar to the diffusive regime of light in tissue, placing all areas on a phase diagram of wave-scattering parameters. Our approach exposes a computational bottleneck they all share and points to remedies such as field compression. Coherent shaping of the incident wavefront to enhance sensitivity is another example of cross-area synergy enabled by the unification.

Bio

Alexey Yamilov co-authored the wavefront-shaping and deep-imaging roadmap, which surveys methods for controlling waves and imaging in complex media. He is a professor of physics at Missouri S&T, where his research focuses on wave propagation, localization, and scattering in complex media. His work also examines coherent control of wave transport and imaging in turbid materials. Other notable studies include research on 3D Anderson localization of electromagnetic waves and on controlling energy density inside disordered media. He has authored nearly 100 peer-reviewed publications in top journals such as Physical Review Letters and Nature Physics. Yamilov is a co-editor of Europhysics Letters for 2026–2029 and a senior member of Optica. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the City University of New York and held postdoctoral and research positions at Northwestern University.