October 2013 NUI Galway PhD Student Receives Award at Optics + Photonics Symposium in San Diego

Ronan Havelin, a PhD student from NUI Galway’s Medical Physics research group in the School of Physics, recently received the SPIE-Newport Research Excellence Award. Ronan, from Salthill, Galway City, was awarded the prize for a paper he presented on ‘A SPECT imager with synthetic collimation’ at the Optics + Photonics symposium in San Diego. The Optics + Photonics symposium is one of the two largest SPIE conferences.

Dr Mark Foley, Principle Investigator for this research project at NUI Galway, said: “I would like to congratulate Ronan on winning this prestigious international award that recognises his significant contribution as a young research physicist to the development of this novel molecular imaging technology.”

Ronan’s paper on ‘A SPECT imager with synthetic collimation’ he said, “is an important contribution to the research into SPECT imaging and is part of a large multidisciplinary collaboration funded by the United States National Institutes of Health, and by Science Foundation Ireland. Key investigators in this project are Prof H Barrett and his CGRI group at University of Arizona and researchers in the Discipline of Surgery and at REMEDI, NUI Galway.”

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The Society serves more than 235,000 constituents from approximately 155 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional networking, and patent precedent. SPIE provided over $3.2 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2012.

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