STARSTEM Coordinator Prof. Martin Leahy, researcher Dr Sergey Alexandrov and PhD students Aaron Croke and Soorya James, along with other members from the TOMI research group at NUI Galway, presented their research at the Photonics West conference in the Moscone Conference Centre in San Francisco from the 1st to the 6th of February, 2020.
On Sunday, Prof. Martin Leahy gave a talk on the heart rate app, “Heart rate app at 10: How to write a biophotonics app that reaches more than 500 million people”, that was developed previously by the group and how it has impacted 10 years on from its original conception.
On Monday, Dr Sergey Alexandrov gave an invited talk, “Label-free depth-resolved visualization of the sub-micron structure with nano-sensitivity” which was very well received detailing the stage at which the ns-OCT was at and some of the aspects that the technique was capable of.
On Monday evening both Aaron and Soorya presented their research in the evening poster session. Aaron presented a poster titled “Modelling of plasmon generation of gold nanostars and interactions in tissue for use in optical acoustic imaging”. Soorya’s poster was titled: “Gold nanostars as a contrast agent for tracking stem cell therapy using multispectral optoacoustic tomography”.
Aaron reports: “On Monday after the presentation sessions had finished up for the day I got to present my poster at the evening poster session. Being an international conference it was a surreal experience presenting in a hall with upwards of 200 posters and a couple of hundred attendees. It was an amazing opportunity to be able to present my work to not only fellow researchers in my field but also experts in the field and receive some top-rate feedback. I am very grateful to STARSTEM SPIE to have the opportunity to do this.”
Soorya commented: “It was a great opportunity and my pleasure to represent STARSTEM and present my work at the SPIE Photonics West 2020 conference in San Francisco. As majority of the attendees were students and experts in the field relevant to my research, it was an amazing platform to discuss my work, bounce off interesting ideas and receive constructive feedback about it”.
Learn more about Soorya, Aaron and our other STARSTEM Early Stage researchers here.