Two VISE undergraduates’ conference abstracts accepted as talks for SPIE Photonics West
Kelsey Leeburg and Oscar Benavides will be heading to San Francisco in early 2018 to present talks for the SPIE Photonics West conference. Both students participated in the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering (VISE) Summer Undergraduate Program and are first authors of their respective papers.
Leeburg and Benavides are members of the Diagnostic Imaging and Image-Guided Interventions Laboratory (DIIGI), which is under the direction of Yuankai “Kenny” Tao, assistant professor of biomedical engineering.
Leeburg, a double major in biomedical and electrical engineering, had the fifth highest-ranked abstract in the Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) sub-conference. The co-authored paper is titled, “Multimodal ophthalmic imaging using handheld spectrally encoded coherence tomography and reflectometry (SECTR).”
“I’m very proud of the imaging device that I built this summer so it’s excited to have the opportunity to present my work to the community,” Leeburg said.
She added, “I’m also looking forward to attending the conference so that I can see more of what other research groups are doing with similar technology.”
Benavides, a biomedical engineering major, also said he looks forward to sharing the work and attending an important academic conference.
“I’m grateful and excited for this opportunity to present the research my team members and I worked hard on,” he said. “I’m looking forward to sharing our work at a great venue like SPIE Photonics West and am equally as eager to hear about all the current happenings in the photonics world.”
He co-authored the paper, “Multimodality optical coherence tomography and fluorescence confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscopy for image-guided feedback of intraocular injections in mouse models.”
Tao, a core member of the VISE faculty, is a program committee member and will attend the conference as well.
“SPIE Photonics West is one of the premiere conferences for biomedical optics. The opportunity to present talks to and among leaders in the field is a reflection on the novelty of the projects and hard work my students put into them,” Tao said.
“Hopefully participating in the conference will provide these students with a glimpse into new research innovations and the breadth of the field that will inspire them to pursue future opportunities in optics and photonics,” he said.
SPIE Photonics West is the world’s largest photonics technology event, consisting of three conferences and two exhibitions. The event draws more than 20,000 academic and industry attendees to hear the latest in research, devices, and systems that advance new technologies in global healthcare.