Viktor Gruev is an associate researcher and professor at the Washington University in Saint Louis. He is part of the department of electrotechnical and biomedical engineering.  Gruev works on the development of sensory technologies that are used in the medical field.

You have received a number of awards? Which fields of research do these awards belong to?

My research includes electronics, nanotechnology, sensors, algorithm and bio-medical instruments. The group of students with whom I work and myself have received several awards- best paper and best live demo at the IEEE conference, several best papers in electronics and biomedical journals and magazines, award for innovating in the field of medicine, etc.

Where do you get your inspiration for the research that you do?

Simply said, I have child-like curiosity for science. I am interested to know why nature functions the way it does. I am interested in biology as well as the nature of other organisms that absorb information in a simple manner. I want to know how can we copy nature and paste it into the laboratory and create nature-stimulated sensors along the way. By achieving that we can create news sensors that would allow us to discover things that we could not have by now. Basically, I want to do the things that we used to consider were impossible to do.

At this year’s Macedonia Economic Summit you will talk about sensory technology and its use in medicine. Can you tell us few things about that?

I will talk about a new technology that is based on the eyes of a butterfly, which can see a wider spectrum of colors than the human eye. According to that we developed a camera that mimics the eyes of a butterfly. These cameras are integrated with goggles that can view cells that are cancerogenous. We are in the process of commercializing this new revolutionary technology by implementing it at our hospital in Saint Louis.

As a researcher and professor focused on medical technologies, how do you use your achievements in practice? 

The end-goal with the technologies that we are developing in my lab is to make it useful in every-day medicine. It is very important the work that is being done to make an impact in medicine. I work on technologies that are used on every-day basis and my focus is on inventions that are cheap and useful that can be used all over the world and in places that have limited resources.