Pegah Safavi, a Ph.D. candidate in the F. Joseph Halcomb III, M.D. Department of Biomedical Engineering, won first place and a $750 prize in the UK GradResearch LIVE! 3MT competition for her presentation titled, "What If a Portable Sensor Could Enable Early Alzheimer’s Detection."
Safavi, a researcher in the Biomedical Optics Lab in since fall 2021, focuses on developing a wearable wireless optical sensor to continuously monitor cerebral blood flow and oxygenation in different subjects.
Watch her first-place performance below.
Fatemeh Hamedia, a Ph.D. candidate in the F. Joseph Halcomb III, M.D. Department of Biomedical Engineering, won second place in the Pre-3MT for her presentation titled, "Seeing the Unseen: Optical Imaging for Early Detection of Brain Disorders in Newborns." The Pre-3MT, or early research, competition is for master's and doctoral students in proposal stage or with preliminary findings.
Hamedia, also a researcher in the Biomedical Optics Lab, joined in fall 2022 and focuses on speckle contrast diffuse correlation tomography (scDCT) of cerebral blood flow and oxygenation in deep brain tissues. Her research includes image processing, design, and optimization of optical setup, laser speckle imaging, and scDCT.
All first, second and third-place winners of the 3MT will go on to compete in regional 3MT competitions in the spring.
You can watch full 2024 UK GradResearch LIVE! event here.
About 3MT
UK GradResearch Live! was born out of the The University of Queensland’s 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, a research presentation initiative that challenges graduate students to effectively communicate their research to a general audience, with a single slide, in three minutes or less.
The Graduate School and Graduate Student Congress have hosted 3MT competitions at The University of Kentucky since 2013, and participants have found them an excellent way to practice their communication and presentation skills while sharing their research with their peers.
