Daily News Briefs

The Defense Logistics Agency of the US Department of Defense (DoD) has signed a supplier contract with ONI Medical Systems Inc., a Wilmington, Mass., provider of high-field (1.0 tesla) open, dedicated extremity magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems. ONI will offer its OrthOne MRI system to all branches of the DoD, including the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Department of Veteran Affairs. The contract was delivered with the DoD's first OrthOne order, and installation is expected to be completed at a DoD medical center in the US later this year. The DoD expects that the OrthOne system will enable the medical center to expand its MRI capacity, reduce its costs and address its need to send patients outside the facility for MRI procedures. . . . The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Sensors Council is now accepting applications for the $1000 graduate student scholarship award, sponsored by General Electric Co., that recognizes excellence in graduate student sensors-related research. Applicants must be graduate students in a scientific field (engineering, physics, chemistry, etc.) at the time of application, and should be enrolled full time during the 2005-06 academic year. They must also be IEEE student members. Applications are due Aug. 29; for more information, visit: www.ewh.ieee.org/tc/sensors/ . . . Melles Griot, a supplier of optical components and systems, and Coherent Inc., a provider of photonics-based technology to the commercial and scientific research markets, have signed a limited global agreement allowing for distribution of some of Coherent's laser measurement and control (LMC) products. These include a wide variety of the LMC power-, energy- and wavelength-measuring instrumentation in the Melles Griot Catalog X, which was introduced at Laser Munich in June. . . . Spire Corp. of Bedford, Mass., a company serving the solar energy, biomedical, telecommunications and defense industries with products and services based on a common technology platform, has hired William Wiegler as vice president of corporate marketing.