Edmund Optics (EO), the global provider of optical and imaging components, has announced the recipients of its 2020 Educational Award program. This award is given in recognition of outstanding undergraduate and graduate optics research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs at non-profit colleges and universities worldwide.

$45.000 USD in EO products will be awarded to the Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners in the Americas and Europe to support their research. The remaining twenty-four finalists will receive a $500 product award. The recipient of the Norman Edmund Inspiration Award, which best embodies the legacy of EO’s founder, Norman Edmund, is also chosen from the 30 global finalists and will receive an additional $5.000 in EO products.

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

The Silver Award was awarded 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 awarded to Damian Presti of Universidad Nacional de Quilmes 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, 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.

The Norman Edmund Inspiration Award was awarded to Yi Zuo at University of Hawaii at Manoa for training undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in instrumentation for biomedical applications. Many of their trainees have grown into the next generation of engineers, researchers, and faculty who work in optical and biomedical research worldwide. (Source: EO)