BME Student Wins AHA Funding

Li is designing and building a trimodal OCT/US/NIRF system, which can simultaneously analyze the arteries using optical coherence tomography, ultrasound and near infrared fluorescence. August 20, 2018 - Biomedical engineering graduate student Yan Li has won a two-year American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship. The $53,688 award will help her advance her research into the development of a high-speed intravascular imaging system that can detect and characterize atherosclerosis, the narrowing of the arteries due to the buildup of plaque on artery walls.

Li is designing and building a trimodal OCT/US/NIRF system, which can simultaneously analyze the arteries using optical coherence tomography, ultrasound and near infrared fluorescence. Each of the three approaches plays a specific and complementary role in characterizing the structure and composition of the arteries and the extent of any atherosclerosis occurring there.

The AHA awards the predoctoral fellowships to promising graduate students whose research relates to cardiovascular function, disease and stroke or to related problems, and who intend to pursue careers aimed at improving global cardiovascular health.

“I am so excited and proud to receive AHA Predoctoral fellowship as an international student,” said Li, a third-year doctoral student whose graduate adviser is biomedical engineering professor Zhongping Chen. “It encourages me a lot to go further in my future research.”

- Anna Lynn Spitzer

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