Dr. Lakowicz is a professor at the University of Maryland College of Medicine in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He also is the Director of the Center for Fluorescence Spectroscopy (CFS) in Baltimore.

Dr. Lakowicz attended LaSalle College in Pennsylvania where he earned a B.A. in Chemistry and graduated Magna Cum Laude. He then pursued his M.S. and subsequently a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

After he received his Ph.D., Dr. Lakowicz worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota for six years and moved in 1980 to the University of Maryland at Baltimore, School of Medicine, where he advanced to full professor in 1984.

Since 1988 Dr. Lakowicz has been the Director of the Center for Fluorescence Spectroscopy (CFS), which is a national resource of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the development of fluorescence technologies. The research emphasis of the CFS is on probe chemistry, light quenching, multi-phonon excitation, fluorescence sensing, lifetime imaging and microscopy. In the last few years Prof. Lakowicz began working on a very exciting, new topic Radiative Decay Engineering, which promises revolutionary ways for using fluorescence in the biomedical fields.

In addition to his present research, Dr. Lakowicz has made many significant contributions to the chemical synthesis of new fluorophores, development of time-resolved instrumentation, pioneering studies of photon migration imaging, multi-photon excitation, and in fluorescence sensing.

Along with his extensive academic accomplishments, Dr. Lakowicz has published over 400 scientific articles and has edited several books on Topics in Fluorescence Spectroscopy. His single-author books Principles of Fluorescence Spectroscopy are widely used and conventionally considered to be the central reference in the field of fluorescence research. Dr. Lakowicz was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Fluorescence and the founder of the Journal of Biomedical Optics.