Congratulations to the winners of PicoQuant’s SPIE Photonics West 2021 picture contest

As the Photonics West was held virtually this year, our traditional Young Investigator Award could not be awarded during the BiOS session on Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Superresolution Imaging. Alternatively, we decided to support young researchers by holding a picture contest and asked for selfies with a PicoQuant product.

Congratulations to the two winners of our picture contest:

Phillip McCann (University of Tokyo, Japan) and

Veronika Parfentyeva (ICFO, Spain)

Both will have their SPIE attendance fee refunded by PicoQuant.

Veronika submitted a selfie with a PicoHarp 300, which she uses in a Time-Domain Diffuse Correlation Spectroscopy (TD-DCS) project. It is a novel approach advancing classical DCS with photon time-of-flight information by using a pulsed but still coherent source. It is especially beneficial in studying cerebral hemodynamics as it can provide increased brain sensitivity.

Phillip, who sent us a selfie with a TimeHarp 260 NANO, is currently working on a new method that encodes Raman-activated vibrations of a sample onto its emitted fluorescence intensity in the time-domain. This type of research is impactful as it would allow scientists the option to use a detection method that benefits from the sensitivity of fluorescence while retaining the chemical specificity of Raman scattering.