Dr Alejandro Martinez Jimenez

Research interests

I am a Beatriz Galindo Junior Fellow at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) in Toledo, Spain, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities. I am doing research and teaching Optics and Photonics in the BSc in Physics. I keep close ties with the Applied Optics Group, where I did my PhD and worked as a Research Associate, and we continue to collaborate on new OCT architectures.
My work centres on optical coherence tomography (OCT), a non-invasive interferometric technique that produces high-resolution, three-dimensional images of tissue. My PhD was about speed: I developed swept sources based on time-stretch, mode-locked lasers and MEMS-VCSELs, and built systems able to use them. Making the source faster soon moved the bottleneck to detection, as the digitiser and processing chain could not keep up with multi-GHz signals. This led to some works on downconversion leader-follower OCT (formerly master/slave), where the interference signal is processed in the analogue domain to deliver real-time en-face images, so that only low-bandwidth signals need to be digitised.
Working on these architectures changed how I think about speed on swept source. It is less a goal in itself than a resource that can be spent in different ways: on simpler and cheaper electronics, on sampling how the signal changes over time, or on the many measurements needed to control light in scattering samples.

Professional

Beatriz Galindo Junior fellowship, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Toledo, Spain), [2025]–present. Joined through a Beatriz Galindo Junior fellowship. Member of the GOAT group; teaches Optics and Photonics in the BSc in Physics.

Research Associate, Applied Optics Group, University of Kent, [2023]–[2025]. Worked on endoscopic and full-field swept-source OCT and on downconversion master/slave OCT. Funded by the FoVEnOCT for "Compact Forward-Viewing Endoscopic Optical Coherence Tomography"

PhD, University of Kent. Funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions within the European project NETLAS ("Next Generation of Tunable Lasers for Optical Coherence Tomography"), supervised by Prof. Adrian Podoleanu. Thesis: Towards high-speed Swept Source Optical Coherence Tomography (doi:10.22024/UniKent/01.02.110258). [2020]-[2023]

MSc in Photonics, interuniversity programme of UB, UPC, UAB and ICFO, Barcelona.

BSc in Physics, Universidad de Murcia.