Dr. David Brenes is an Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. His research integrates optical engineering and computer vision to develop intelligent imaging systems for improved disease diagnosis, monitoring, and prognostication. He earned dual B.S.E. degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University (2018) and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Rice University (2023), where he developed AI-enabled optical imaging systems for point-of-care detection of cervical precancer in low-resource settings. He completed his postdoctoral training in the Department of Pathology at the Stanford School of Medicine, where he advanced slide-free 3D pathology to enable more comprehensive and accurate tissue assessment. During his postdoctoral work, he led a multi-institutional research effort supported by ARPA-H to advance technologies for rapid intraoperative margin assessment for surgical guidance and held a Washington Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship.
Research Areas
Dr. Brenes develops intelligent imaging systems that integrate light-sheet microscopy, tissue clearing, and AI-guided adaptive acquisition to characterize both the morphology and molecular composition of intact tissues in 3D. His work addresses a central limitation of conventional pathology: consequential clinical decisions often rely on a few thin 2D sections that capture only a small fraction of the information in a specimen. By pairing high-throughput microscopes with scalable computer vision, his lab will develop new methods to assess disease patterns often missed or misinterpreted in conventional histology and will enable better guidance for diagnosis, treatment decisions, and prognosis.