Edmund Optics announces its 2020 Educational Award winners

10 Feb 2021

Gold Educational Award for Rochester development of breast cancer screening tool; Norman Edmund winner is Yi Zuo at University of Hawaii.

Edmund Optics (EO), a provider of optical and imaging components, has announced the recipients of its 2020 Educational Award program. The EO Awards are presented each year by the Barrington, NJ-based company in recognition of outstanding undergraduate and graduate optics research at non-profit colleges and universities worldwide.

$45,000 worth of EO products are awarded to the Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners in the Americas and Europe to support their research. The remaining twenty-four finalists receive a $500 product award.

The recipient of the Norman Edmund Inspiration Award, which “best embodies the legacy of the company’s founder, Norman Edmund”, is also chosen from the 30 global finalists and receives an additional $5,000 in EO products.

Gold, Silver, and Bronze Award winners

In the Americas, the Gold Award was awarded to Shravan Gupta at University of Rochester, NY, US, for the development of a breast cancer screening tool for surgical pathologists to reduce misdiagnosis of breast biopsies by a factor of 10X.

The Silver Award was awarded to Christian Jennings at University of Texas at Austin, TX, US, for the construction of a novel flow cytometer that combines nonlinear broadband coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering spectroscopy and real-time deformability cytometry to holistically evaluate individual pancreatic cancer cells.

The Bronze Award was awarded to Damian Presti of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Argentina, for the development of a low-cost biophotonic device capable of detecting Covid-19 in low-income settings.

In Europe, the Gold Award was awarded to Sammy Florczak of UMC Utrecht, The Netherlands for the development of a 3D volumetric printing process to enable the fast fabrication of advanced cell-laden scaffolds to repair tissues and organs.

The Silver Award was awarded to Justyna Labuz of Jagiellonian University, Poland for the development of a real time detection device for UV and visible light induced chloroplast movements through simultaneous recording of changes in red light transmittance and reflectance of plant leaves.

The Bronze Award was awarded to Paulo Lourenço of Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, for the development of a point-of-care detection platform prototype for acute kidney injury, based on a photonic integrated circuit containing an array of interferometric plasmonic sensors.

Norman Edmund Inspiration Award winner

The Norman Edmund Inspiration Award was awarded to Yi Zuo at University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI, USA for training students and postdoctoral researchers in instrumentation for biomedical applications. Many of their trainees have since become the next generation of engineers, researchers, and faculty members who work in optical and biomedical research worldwide.