4/28/2023 Bethan Owen
Bioengineering PhD student Janet Sorrells received the JenLab Young Investigator Award at SPIE Photonics West for her work on photon-counting technology that will allow for faster, more convenient cellular imaging.
Written by Bethan Owen
Bioengineering PhD student Janet Sorrells received the JenLab Young Investigator Award at SPIE Photonics West for her work on photon-counting technology that will allow for faster, more convenient cellular imaging.
To win this award at the world’s premiere optics event, Sorrells was reviewed based on her oral presentation, poster, and proceedings paper on her work, all compared to other highly talented fellow researchers from around the world. Sorrells also had the opportunity to meet the founder and president of the company Karsten Koenig, a prominent, well-respected figure in the field.
“It just inspired me more to keep pushing on,” said Sorrells. “I'm very overwhelmed with how much I have grown to love my field and my work. It’s exactly what I hoped for but didn’t know was possible when I considered doing PhD programs.”
She has cause to be excited: the award-winning technology that Sorrells is developing can acquire imaging data two to 20 times faster than what’s currently commercially available.
Current methods use analog electronics to count photons, but because analog electronics have limited bandwidth and temporal resolution, the timing can’t be perfectly precise. In response, Sorrells and her team are dramatically improving their precision by directly digitizing the detector output.
This means that the team is able to get extremely high frequencies in their data, and can count photons using GPU-accelerated processing. Essentially, instead of counting photons before digitization as current methods do, the team counts photons after digitization.
“What we're doing is a totally different way of acquiring data that other people haven't done before,” said Sorrells. “And it provides the same end result that you can get if you've purchased a traditional commercial system.”
This technology can image anything involving autofluorescence, which includes nearly all mammalian samples. As a result, it’s an extremely practical imaging method with a variety of real-world applications. Beyond providing this wide-reaching and much faster imaging service, Sorrells’ technology will make life a little easier for the imagers themselves.
“As a grad student doing a lot of imaging, I spent a lot of time sitting in the dark waiting for my images to acquire,” said Sorrells. “Not only is this technology more convenient, but we can also spend less time sitting in the dark.”
Sorrells thanked her advisor Professor Stephen Boppart, Professor Marina Marjanovic, and her labmates for the mentorship and support that helped to make this award a reality.
Sorrells also recently won the Illinois Innovation Award for this technology. Read more about that here!