Congratulations to Guilherme Fernandes, visiting PULSE Lab PhD student, whose thesis (based on work completed in the PULSE Lab) won the 2025 CAPES Thesis Award in the field of Medicine II in Brazil. The CAPES Thesis Award recognizes the best doctoral theses defended in Brazilian postgraduate programs based on the following criteria: originality, relevance to scientific, technological, cultural, social, and innovation development, and the value added by the educational system to the candidate.
Guilherme’s thesis “Impact of skin tone on photoacoustic images with linear transducer: in vivo and in silico studies” used short-lag spatial coherence (SLSC) beamforming of photoacoustic images (the theory for which was developed by the PULSE Lab) to demonstrate acoustic clutter reduction in images of radial arteries of multiple volunteers with a wide range of skin tones. This work has implications for the detection of cancer and other diseases in multiple fields of medicine.