Approximately 70 students participated in the BME Spring 2012 Undergraduate Research Symposium & Competition held on Friday, May 4 in the BME Building. Participating undergraduate students showcased research they conducted alongside faculty and biomedical engineering graduate students.

Asvin Bashyam, from Professor Stanislav Emelianov's lab, took first place for his research project titled Noninvasive in vivo Photoacoustic Detection of Sentinel Lymph Nodes with Silica-Coated Gold Nanoplates. Paul Gonzales, from Professor Jeanne Stachowiak's lab, took second place for his project titled Giant Unilamellar Vesicles: Liquid Ordered Domain Dissolution. Suraj Makhija, from Professor Stanislav Emelianov's lab, took third place for his project titled Oxidative Creation of Stacking Faults to Produce Monodisperse Gold Nanoplates from Silver Nanoseeds. Nazariy Shaydyuk, from Professor Andrew Dunn's lab, took fourth place and a $50 prize for his project titled 3D Maps of Cortical Vasculature Oxygenation and Dendritic Spine Counting.

The annual symposium was co-hosted by the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Graduate Undergraduate Research Union, a partnership that fosters research between undergraduate and graduate students. The judging panel was made up of biomedical engineering faculty and industry representatives from the following companies: Apollo Endosurgery, Bioo Scientific, Celling Biosciences, Luminex, MiRNA Therapeutics, and Terapio.

View phtos from the event.