April 14, 2008 —
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Lisong Ai accepts the Symposium's top prize, the
Grodins Graduate Award, from professor Michael Khoo
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Some of the brightest minds in the Viterbi School’s Department of Biomedical Engineering gathered earlier this month for a display of student projects at 12th Annual Fred S. Grodins Graduate Research Symposium.
Organized by a committee of doctoral students, the annual Grodins Symposium grants awards for presentations on BME topics in both platform and poster form.
The day’s top prize, the Grodins Graduate Award for academic excellence and outstanding research went to Lisong Ai for his work, Micro-Intravascular Sensor to Link Fluid Shear Stress with Oxidative Stress in Vivo, and for maintaining a cumulative GPA of 4.0.
The USC Stevens Institute also unveiled a newly award at the symposium, the Most Innovative Project award, granted to Ronalee Lo for her work on, A Passive Refillable MEMS Ocular Drug Delivery Device.
In all, 72 posters and 12 platform talks were presented by BME graduate students at the April 5 event, held at the Galen Center.
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Ronalee Lo presents her research at the 2008 Grodins
Graduate Research Symposium
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The Symposium began in 1997 as a forum for BME graduate students to present research and discuss future plans. The event remains student-run, this year by a committee of doctoral students including Brittany Kay, Suvimol “Ming” Sangkatumvong, Christian Gutierrez, Phillip Hendrickson, Vinod “Tim” Nayar and Jay Mung.
Sponsors of the event included the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering at USC, Genentech, Reichert, Amgen (Global Epidemiology Division), Advanced Medical Optics, Medtronic Spinal and Biologics, the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation and the USC Biomimetic Microelectronics Systems Engineering Research Center.
Other awards given at the symposium included best Platform Presentation, also granted to Lo. Runners-up were Joy Hsu for Animal to Human Scaling of Anticancer Drug Pharmacokinetics via a Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic Model, and Markus Hauschild for “Restoring Reaching Movements Using Signals from Posterior Parietal Cortex.”
First prize for best poster presentation went to Jeremy Fishel for Measurement of Sliding Friction-Induced Vibrations for Tactile Feedback Control. Runners-up were Gabriela Mallen-Ornelas for her work, A MEMS Microfluidic Platform for Focal Chemical Stimulation, and Bosun Kwon for, Modified Gelatin Crosslinked with Silane as Delivery Carriers.
