School of Engineering graduate student Alex Walsh has been selected to attend the 64th Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany, this summer.
The Lindau Meeting brings together graduate students and junior researchers with Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and physiology and medicine for a weeklong series of lectures, informal meetings and discussions. The concentration for this year’s meeting, which takes place June 29-July 4, 2014, is physiology and medicine.
“I am excited for this unique opportunity to attend the upcoming Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. At the meeting I will interact with Nobel Laureate researchers and my peers from many disciplines and countries,” said Walsh, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering.
Walsh works in the optical imaging lab of Melissa Skala, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, where she currently specializes in new imaging techniques to distinguish breast cancer subtypes.
A study led by Walsh was published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research in 2013. Walsh and colleagues used laser technology and a custom-built multiphoton microscope to distinguish breast cancer subtypes and determine if specific therapies work in as little as two days compared to current methods that can take weeks or months.
Walsh is the recipient of numerous awards and honors. She has received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, and has been awarded a research grant from the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery. As a result of winning the 2013 JenLab Young Investigator Award, she delivered a talk in July last year on optical metabolic imaging at an international workshop on Advanced Multiphoton and Fluorescence Lifetime Techniques in Saarbrucken, Germany.
Students and young researchers from around the world are nominated by the Meeting’s sponsoring agencies and organizations, including the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy. Approximately 75 nominees were accepted last year.
This marks the seventh year in a row a Vanderbilt student has been selected to attend, with Walsh the 14th student overall selected from Vanderbilt since 2002.