PhD student wins best student paper award at Photonics West at first conference presentation

Second year photonics PhD student, Panagiotis Galanis, has been awarded Best Student Paper at SPIE Photonics West, San Francisco, earlier in February. This was Panagiotis’ first ever presentation at a conference.

Panagiotis (Panos), who belongs to the Optoelectronics Research Centre’s (ORC) research group Laser Direct Write Technologies for Biomedical Sensors, received a certificate and cash prize of $1000USD from the Award sponsor, Microfluidic ChipShop.

His paper, entitled ‘Laser-direct-writing to enable filtration in paper-based devices’ for point-of-care-diagnostics, was presented during the ‘Microfluidics, BioMEMS, and Medical Microsystems’ symposium. Panos’ is using a laser-based technique to pattern paper in order to enable an add-on functionality of filtration within these devices. The application of the work is to selectively filter particles based on their size, with an end-goal of separating plasma from red blood cells.

On receiving the award Panos commented: "I am delighted to have been chosen for this Award. It has been a privilege to present my paper at such a prestigious international conference and I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I am excited about continuing my PhD and presenting further papers.”

Dr Collin Sones, Panos’ primary PhD supervisor at the ORC, said: “This is an excellent achievement for Panos and an incredible experience to be able to enable him to present at Photonics West. I look forward to seeing him develop throughout the remainder of his PhD.”