Edmund Optics announces 2018 Educational Award winners

Edmund Optics’ has announced the winners of its 2017 Educational Awards, which acknowledge novel projects involving optics that will have an impact on future applications, and is given annually to undergraduate and graduate programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics at non-profit colleges and universities working on projects involving optics.

More than $45,000 (USD) in Edmund Optics products will be awarded to the Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners in the Americas and Europe. All remaining finalists will receive a $500 product matching grant to assist in their research while the Normand Edmund Inspiration Award, which is given to the optics program that best embodies the legacy of Norman Edmund, will receive $5,000 in products. The Inspiration Award winner will be given to one of the global finalists on November 8, 2017.

Edmund Optic’s Educational Award team evaluated more than 750 applications to narrow the field down to 30 global finalists with applications ranging from the development of a compressed ultrafast microscopy (CUMic) system used to image neuronal activities in real time to a smart optical malaria diagnostic instrument that is deployable to low-resource settings.

The 2017 Educational Award winners are as follows:

The Americas

• Gold ($10,000 in EO products): Jinyang Liang and a team from the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique in Canada for the development of the CUMic system.
• Silver ($7,500 in EO products): Fernando Alvira and a team from the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes in Argentina for the implementation of an interferometric spectrometer for Raman Spectroscopy as a tool to diagnose Alzheimer‘s Disease.
• Bronze ($5,000 in EO products): Daniel Leman and a team from Boston University in the United States for the design of a lightweight, 3D-printed, wireless-capable microscope for single photo fluorescence imaging in awake, behaving animals.

Europe

• Gold (€7,000 in EO products): Thorsten Schwerte and a team from the Universität Innsbruck in Austria for the disruption of host targeting in blood feeding flight insects by dynamic light pattern projection in dark and light rooms.
• Silver (€5,000 in EO products): Hai Gong and a team from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands for the development of a smart optical malaria diagnostic instrument.
• Bronze (€3,000 in EO products): Florian Bayer and a team from Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen in Germany for the development of a 4-fold DLP projection system with filtered high-power LEDs to investigate previously inaccessible, fundamental mechanisms of signal processing of the human retina.

View more information on the awards.

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