Newsmaker: George Stetten

Noteworthy: Stetten was granted a Research to Prevent Blindness Innovative Ophthalmic Research Award to support his ongoing research using augmented reality to help surgeons better see and feel during operations on the eye.

Age: 59

Family: Wife, Nancy; two daughters

Residence: Fox Chapel

Occupation: Professor of bioengineering in the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering. Serves as a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and is director of Pitt and CMU's Visualization and Image Analysis Laboratory and the Music Engineering Laboratory.

Background: Stetten has been at Pitt since 1999, where he invented the sonic flashlight, which allows surgeons to see above and below the skin simultaneously.

Education: Stetten earned a bachelor's degree in engineering and applied physics from Harvard University in 1976, a master's degree in biology from New York University in 1986, an M.D. from State University of New York, Syracuse, in 1991 and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of North Carolina in 2000.

Quote: “We're taking reality and augmenting it, and we're doing it with imaging as well as touch..”