Yumiao Zhang, a PhD student in the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical and Biological Engineering, won the first-place prize out of a field of 150 entrants for his poster presentation last month at the 41st Northeast Bioengineering Conference (NEBEC 2015).

Zhang’s poster, “Frozen Naphthalocyanine micelles for Intestinal Imaging,” presents a new,noninvasive method to image intestine function. By engineering nanoparticles with extremely high color content, their motion could be traced noninvasively in the intestine using an imaging technique called photoacoustic tomography.

This method eventually could lead to better diagnosis of conditions like Crohn’s disease, or be used for colonoscopy screening procedures.

Zhang, a student in the lab of Jonathan Lovell, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, led the research, which involved a multidisciplinary team from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; POSTECH University in Korea and McMaster University in Canada.

The first-place prize comes with a $500 cash prize.