Nicholas Durr, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been named a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Early CAREER Award, which recognizes early stage scholars with high levels of promise and excellence.
Durr’s research focuses on translational optics and machine learning to improve health care. His five-year CAREER award, “Computational structured light imaging for widefield mapping of histologic primitives,” will create new optical and artificial intelligence technologies that allow histology of unprocessed tissues. This new “slide-free” approach could reduce misdiagnoses, reduce costs, improve the speed of diagnosis, and ultimately improve biopsy guidance or tumor margin assessment for a wide range of cancers.