Jianwei Miao

Jianwei (John) Miao is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute. He pioneered computational microscopy by unifying crystallography and microscopy through coherent diffraction and algorithms, replacing lenses with computation. In 1999, he demonstrated the first experimental coherent diffractive imaging (CDI), which laid the foundation for modern ptychography and reshaped nanoscale and atomic-scale structural measurement across synchrotron radiation, X-ray free electron lasers, high-harmonic generation, optical microscopy, and electron microscopy.

In 2012, Miao applied the CDI method to pioneer Atomic Electron Tomography (AET), enabling the first determination of 3D atomic structures without assuming crystallinity or averaging. In 2025, he published a single-author review article in Nature titled "Computational microscopy with coherent diffractive imaging and ptychography", which encapsulates 25 years of advancements in computational imaging that have fundamentally transformed the field of microscopy.