Bioengineering graduate student earns Fateley Award

8/1/2011 Greta Weiderman

The Coblentz Society has selected Rohith Krishna Reddy, a PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering, to receive the Fateley Award.

Written by Greta Weiderman

The Coblentz Society has selected Rohith Krishna Reddy, a PhD student in the Department of Bioengineering, to receive the Fateley Award.

The award is given to a student who most closely embodies the spirit of the late William Fateley’s desire to promote the science and society of spectroscopy. The award consists of a $1,000 prize to help offset the costs of attending the National Meeting of the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies in Reno in October. The award will be presented at the conference.

Rohith Reddy
Rohith Reddy
Rohith Reddy
The Coblentz Society gives four to five students each year Awards in Vibrational Spectroscopy, and from among the top three, it selects one as the most outstanding – the Fateley Awardee.

“This is a tremendous international recognition of his capabilities and promise as an emerging scholar,” said Reddy’s mentor, Professor Rohit Bhargava. Reddy is a member of Bhargava’s research team, the Chemical Imaging and Structures Laboratory at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Reddy works with Bhargava to research cancer diagnosis using infrared spectroscopic imaging.

More specifically, his work involves demonstrating and improving the efficacy of automated cancer detection in thin tissue sections using mid-infrared spectroscopic imaging.

Mid-infrared spectroscopic imaging provides simultaneous chemical and morphological information, and Reddy and fellow researchers have shown that this information can be used for automated diagnosis of prostate and breast cancers.

He is also working to develop new infrared spectroscopy instrumentation techniques jointly with Bhargava and Professor Paul Scott Carney in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“To this end, we have developed techniques to dramatically increase the speed of data collection,” he said. “We have developed theoretical models and have proposed several additions and changes to current instruments that significantly enhance their capacity to obtain microscopic information useful for cancer diagnosis.”

Reddy is working to develop the theoretical framework and design for building infrared spectroscopic tomography instruments capable of non-invasively visualizing tissue morphology.

“This can potentially be used for diagnosing cancer non-invasively on a microscopic scale,” he said.


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This story was published August 1, 2011.