Rhea Rasquina, a 2024 summer REU student in the PULSE Lab, won 1st place in the BiOs Student 3-Minute Poster Competition at SPIE Photonics West 2025, taking home the coveted $500 prize. Rhea concisely summarized her summer research efforts on the influence of skin tone on target size detectability in photoacoustic breast imaging. The presentation was judged based on content and effectiveness by representatives from the Editorial Boards of JBO, Neurophotonics, and Biophotonics Discovery. Organized annually by SPIE, this year’s competition was co-hosted by Prof. Muyinatu Bell (JBO EIC) and Prof. Darren Roblyer (Biophotonics Discovery EIC), and the judges were Profs. Amy Oldenburg, Jana Kainerstorfer, Darcy Peterka, and Mihaela Balu.
Congratulations, Rhea! And, thanks to the SPIE journals, JBO, BIOS, and Neurophotonics for sponsoring this competition.
More details about the award-winning research are available in Rhea’s first-author publication in Biophotonics Discovery.