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May 5, 2008 ENG student wins top prize at Graduate Student Poster Day By Kate Fink |
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“They said it was nice work,” said Emre Ozkumur (ECE) of the judges who evaluated his poster and presentation at the 2008 Science and Engineering Research Symposium. “But, until the end, you never really know.” In the end, Ozkumur won the day’s most prestigious prize, the President’s Award, for his work in Professor Selim Ünlü’s laboratory. Ozkumur was among the science and medical research graduate students honored at an awards ceremony May 5 for the top finishers in the event, which was held on March 31. Engineering graduate students won half of the of the event’s 16 awards. Ozkumur’s poster depicted a laboratory test he is developing that reduces time, expense and error from detecting specific molecules – such as those used to diagnose diseases -- in the bloodstream. “We’re developing a system that can look at many different biomolecular interactions at the same time,” he said. For example, in a hepatitis patient, the test could detect an array of different antigen molecules that fluctuate in concentration throughout the course of the disease, indicating the stage of the patient’s illness, he said. Typically, such tests can only search for one type of antigen molecule at a time. Each test involves multiple steps, the last of which is tagging an antibody with a fluorescent marker so results are visible to the researcher. Ozkumur’s system is label-free. Instead, he anchors antibodies that will attract the antigen he wants to measure to a silicon dioxide wafer. He then focuses a laser on the surface and measures the light’s reflected wavelength to ascertain minute changes in the wafer’s thickness that indicate the antigen’s presence. A few antigens might change the wafer’s thickness by a nanometer, but if more accumulate – indicating a more concentrated presence of that antigen in the patient’s blood– the wafer could be 10 nanometers thicker. “It’s like looking at a basketball court from an airplane,” says Ozkumur. “With no basketballs on the court, you don’t see anything. With five, you may not see those individual five, just a faint tint of orange. If you cover the whole court you’ll see the bright orange color.” The test not only tells Ozkumur how many antigen molecules accumulate, he can also watch how quickly they stick to find out the strength of the interaction. A single wafer can be divided into many sections or spots -- each with a different anchored antibody binding a specific antigen -- to efficiently test for many molecules at once. A paper on Ozkumur’s work on this system has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other engineering graduate students honored at the ceremony include: Ayca Yalcin, Xiaoyu Zheng –last year’s President’s Award winner, Bradley Kaanta, Zachary Waters, Brian Hicks, Yirong Pu and Hu Tao. More information on the Research Symposium Award winners, including their poster abstracts, is available here. |
 Emre Ozkumur |
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