Rohith Reddy of Rohit Bhargava’s research group has been awarded the Tomas Hirschfeld Award from the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies. Reddy is the third student from Bhargava’s Chemical Imaging and Structures Laboratory to win the prestigious award.

            The Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS) plays host to its annual conference called the Great Scientific Exchange, at which Reddy will be presented his award this fall. The award is chosen by the FACSS Student Award Committee to honor the most outstanding papers submitted to the conference.

Reddy said the research he is doing has implications for advancing imaging techniques, especially as they apply to cancer detection.

“Modeling light propagation through an FT-IR spectroscopic imaging instrument is fundamentally important to the understanding and analysis of FT-IR imaging data,” Reddy said. “From a deep understanding of the instrument gained via modeling, we developed and implemented techniques resulting in significantly higher spatial detail and image quality in FT-IR imaging.

“This improved design has led to high-definition FT-IR imaging. Additionally, we show that cancer detection can be improved by utilizing the higher spatial detail from high-definition imaging data.”

The website for the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies (FACSS) stated that the organization was “founded as a Federation of member organizations for the exchange of ideas at the forefront of to disseminate technical information dealing with the applied, pure, or natural sciences.”