European higher-ed optics programs win Edmund Optics grants

Barrington, NJ--Following last week's announcement regarding Edmund Optics' grant awards in the form of the company's products to innovative undergraduate and graduate optics programs in the Americas and Asia, the company has also awarded grants to the same types of programs in Europe.

The first-place award went to Stefan Sinzinger of the Technische Universität Ilmenau (Ilmenau, Germany), who won a €5,000 products grant for research on the development of optical systems to improve optical tweezing and digital holography for the micromanipulation and analysis of particle flows in integrated microfluidic systems. Due to the high degree of miniaturization and integration, microfluidics enable investigations with extremely low probe volumes to speed up research and development in biomedical applications such as drug testing and disease treatments at a reasonable cost. As both fluorescence detection and optical tweezers are extremely helpful in handling and analyzing biological specimens, it is of specific interest to adapt optical tweezers for use in microfluidic systems.

James Rice of University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland) earned second place—€3,000 in products—for work that involves development of an optical nanoscopy and nanoimaging tool, which will uniquely achieve sub-surface and sub-100 nm chemical mapping of biological (and functional) materials and address specific questions in regards to interactions that nanomaterials have within soft-condensed matter environments. And the third-place award of €2,000 in products went to Verónica Sáiz of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Valencia, Spain) for research that combines machine vision sensors and GPS for vegetative vigor mapping of small- and mid-sized wine farms to determine intensity of photosynthetic activity aa well as plant health status—an approach that can also be applied to a variety of industries.

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