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Student Success: Ph.D. Student Utku Baran Receives College of Engineering Student Award for Research

April 27, 2016

COEAwards-UtkuBaran_updated_000With more than a dozen first-authored papers and three patents to his name in just three years of Ph.D. studies, EE student Utku Baran has received the College of Engineering Student Award for Research.

“I’m very happy to represent EE in the College of Engineering awards,” said Baran.  He will receive the award at the College of Engineering Awards Ceremony on May 12.

Baran was nominated by his Ph.D. adviser, Bioengineering Professor Ruikang Wang, and EE Professor and Chair Radha Poovendran.  “He has been nothing but prolific as a student,” wrote Poovendran, “with numerous first-author articles in highly prestigious archival journals.”

Baran’s research focus is a non-invasive medical imaging practice called Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), which creates a high-resolution (micron-scale) 3D image of living tissue.  In particular, Baran has been developing functional OCT for applications in dermatology and neuroscience.

Of Baran’s work, his adviser Wang wrote, “I believe this work is a real breakthrough in biomedical imaging because any technology that can be used to image the lymphatic system in the human body without a need for contrasting dyes will have an enormous clinical impact in the diagnosis and treatment monitoring of many diseases.”

After completing his Ph.D. this spring, Baran will move to Caltech where he’ll join Prof. Lihong Wang’s biophotonics group as a postdoctoral research fellow.

Congratulations, Utku!