Kadi Liis Saar and Martin Chan win prize for best student research project for their work on the imaging of protein self assembly reactions.
Kadi Liis Saar and Martin Chan currently undertake a final year Masters Research project with us. Their work concerns the development of novel imaging strategies to visualise the growth of protein fibrils in the test tube so as to gain mechanistic insights into the protein misfolding and their aggregation into toxic structures. Kadi uses atomic force microscopy (AFM) to image the morphology and structure of proteins at high resolution and Martin focuses on the development of advanced image processing algorithms that track, in real time, the shape and size distributions of fibrils in noisy image data.
Other students currently doing projects with us are Matthew Vokes and Karol Jaworski who gave an equally impressive performance presenting their work on LED based cavity ringdown spectroscopy of liquid analytes. Their instrument is based on phase shift cavity ringdown spectroscopy (CRDS) and achieves record sensitivity at a fraction of the cost of currently available instruments, opening up opportunities for use in the field and in research.
The final year research project is a vital component of the Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology Masters course and prizes are awarded for best presentations, posters, and discussions with examiners among cohorts of 70 or so final year students. The laser group is proud of its long list of winners over the years and we are delighted to see success again this year. A particular thanks goes to the day-to-day supervisors, Dora Pinotsi and Weiwei Cai, who supervised this year's students and put in enormous energy to make these projects fly.
If you a are interested in joining us for Masters of PhD projects - get in touch!
This year's winners in the final year research projects. Kadi (bottom left) and Martin (top left) win first prizes for their presentations. Other prize winners shown are Beatrice Ku, Dharshan Vadivelu, Meichen Lu, Yanlong Choo, Sophie Duffield, and Lauren Atherton. For full details see news on the departmental website.