Edmund Optics Announces 2020 Award Recipients

Edmund Optics announced the recipients of its 2020 Educational Award program and the winner of the Norman Edmund Inspiration Award, named for company’s founder. Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners of the Educational Awards in the Americas and in Europe, chosen from a pool of 30 finalists, will receive $45,000 in Edmund Optics products to support their research, and the remaining 24 finalists will receive a $500 product award. The recipient of the Norman Edmund Inspiration Award, also chosen from the 30 global finalists, will receive $5000 in Edmund Optics products.

Americas

The Gold Award was granted to Shravan Gupta at the University of Rochester for the development of a breast cancer screening tool for surgical pathologists to reduce misdiagnosis of breast biopsies by a factor of 10.

The Silver Award was granted to Christian Jennings at the University of Texas at Austin 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 granted to Damian Presti of Universidad Nacional De Quilmes in Argentina for the development of a low-cost biophotonic device capable of detecting COVID-19 in low-income settings.

Europe

The Gold Award was granted to Sammy Florczak of UMC Utrecht in 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 granted to Justyna Labuz of Jagiellonian University in 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 granted to Paulo Lourenço of Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa in 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

Yi Zuo of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa was awarded the Norman Edmund Inspiration Award for training undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in instrumentation for biomedical applications.