Paul K Hansma

Paul K. Hansma is an American physicist and inventor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His inventions in the areas of scanning tunneling microscopy and atomic force microscopy were commercialized by Digital Instruments (now Bruker) as the Multimode and Dimension Atomic Force Microscopes. He co-invented the Scanning Ion-Conductance Microscope with Barney Drake. More recently he has co-invented medical instruments that are being commercialized by Active Life Scientific, Inc. as the BioDent and Osteoprobe RUO Reference Point Indentation (RPI), instruments for use in measuring tissue mechanical properties in patients. The first applications are to measuring bone mechanical properties relevant to fracture risk in patients.