Dr. Hui Wang, assistant professor in the CPB department, has received the A. Ward Ford Memorial Research Grant: a grant with the goal of encouraging the medical use of lasers.

The award, administered by the Community Foundation of North Central Wisconsin and guided by the American Society for Laser Medicine and Surgery, is helping to fund his current research project.

The project, titled "Development of Ultrasensitive Fiber-optic Radiometric Thermometry for Guiding Interstitial Laser Thermal Therapy,” works to better the minimally invasive surgical technology called interstitial laser thermal therapy (ILTT). So far, Dr. Wang and his team have demonstrated that it is possible to monitor tissue temperature, a critical component of open-skull surgeries.

For this award, the team proposed the development of an ultrasensitive detection system. Now, their objective is to use a single fiber to conduct laser surgery and tissue temperature monitoring simultaneously.

The groundwork for this project was done by Paris Franz, a former undergraduate student at Miami who is now seeking her Ph,D. at Stanford University.

By Jenna Calderón, CEC Reporter