Edmund Optics announces 2016 Educational Award winners

Edmund Optics’ has announced the winners of its 2016 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 9, 2016.

Edmund Optic’s Educational Award team evaluated more than 600 applications to narrow the field down to 30 global finalists with applications ranging from a vision system that tracks the rotation of a log as it travels down a sawmill production line to an ultrafast volumetric imager of neurovascular dynamics in the neocortex of awake mice.

The 2016 Educational Award winners are as follows:

The Americas

• Gold ($10,000 in EO products): Edgar Spalding and a University of Wisconsin-Madison team for research on the genetic control of plant growth and development with high-throughput, high-resolution machine vision assays.
• Silver ($7,500 in EO products): Jairo Salazar and a Cinvestav (Mexico) team for the design and development of a low-cost, Hyperspectral Image Sensor (HIS) used to develop new applications for precision agriculture, recycling, remote sensing, manufacturing, and defense and health industries.
• Bronze ($5,000 in EO products): Oybek Kholiqov and a University of California-Davis team for the development of Interferometric Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (iNIRS) for real-time quantitative monitoring of oxygen metabolism and cerebral blood flow.

Europe

• Gold (€7,000 in EO products): Severin Filser and a DZNE Munich team for research into the development of a minimally invasive micro-endoscope to analyze corticostriatal network dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease.
• Silver (€5,000 in EO products): Mads Sylvest Bergholt and a team from Imperial College London for the development of the first wide field near-infrared Raman imaging probe for intraoperative margin assessment using novel optical design and engineering.
• Bronze (€3,000 in EO products): Bárbara Buades Sabater and a team from The Institute of Photonic Sciences (Spain) for research on ultrafast electron dynamics at a sub-femtosecond scale to understand how sensors and transistors work and how energy is stored.

View more information on the awards.