Student success!

July has been a fantastic month for our students who have picked up lots of awards, grants and prizes!

Graduate school symposium

Tempest Van Schaik won one of three highly commended for public engagement prizes at the recent Graduate School Symposium for her poster ‘Microelectrode arrays for studying oxygen consumption in cultured endothelial cells during angiogenesis’. The team of judges marked posters not only on their content and appearance but also on the presenters’ ability to talk about their research in a way that can be shared with the general public. Congratulations Tempest!

Royal Society of Chemistry

Tempest also received the prize for runner up for best talk at the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Postgraduate Electrochemistry Symposium at the Department of Chemistry, University College London recently.

John Lever memorial prize

Congratulations to outgoing Bioengineering Society President, Francois Okoroafor, who has been awarded the John Lever Memorial Prize for student engagement in Bioengineering. The award was made by Professor Lever’s wife Gill and daughter Clare who gave the following speech:
“John always gave priority to the welfare of his students, and the large number of tributes we received is testimony to this selfless philosophy – his students referring to him as a great educator, mentor, colleague and friend.
We are grateful to Bioengineering for recognising John’s contribution to this department by creating this award, and today’s recipient, Francois Okoroafor, shares all those selfless qualities which John demonstrated.
As a very, very mature London University student I am fully aware of the demands on your time, so to organise networking events among Bioengineering students at Imperial College and Oxford, and to invite leaders from industry to speak to the students shows an impressive level of responsibility, creativity and commitment. To also serve as class president and be actively involved in working as a volunteer with several charities is a remarkable achievement.”
Many congratulations to Francois on this prestigious award.

ASME summer bioengineering conference

Véronique Peiffer received third prize in the PhD student paper competition of the ASME Summer Bioengineering Conference 2012, which took place in Puerto Rico in June.

Biologically Inspired Computer Vision news

PhD student Shuoying Cao has won the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine (IPEM) Bursary Scheme. The scheme provides awards to support development and scholarship in the application of physical science and engineering in medicine and biology. It is highly competitive award is restricted to one award per institution per year.

Shuoying has also received the ‘I J Shelley Travel Grant’ from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). This is also a highly competitive annual scholarship, with only six awarded globally each year to support attendance at the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC 2012), which this year will be held in San Diego, USA. At this conference, Shuoying will present a paper titled ‘Patch-based automatic retinal vessel segmentation in global and local structural context” (co-authors are Drs Anil Bharath and Jeffrey Ng and Professor Kim Parker). Only ten papers were selected for oral presentation in the ‘Retinal Image Analysis’ sessions in this conference, many congratulations to Shuoying!

PhD success

Congratulations to Dr Hammad Omer who successfully passed his PhD examination this month. Dr Omer’s PhD thesis was entitled ‘Parallel MRI: tools and applications’, he was supervised by Dr Robert Dickinson.