This month, graduate student Fahri Emre Öztürk from the National Nanotechnology Research Center (UNAM) received the best poster award at the fall 2014 Materials Research Society (MRS) meeting in Boston, USA. The organization’s yearly fall meeting is the preeminent annual event in materials research; this year’s meeting featured over 50 symposia and was attended by over 6,800 researchers from every corner of the globe. MRS poster awards are given in recognition of technical content, appearance and presentation quality.
Poster authors Fahri Emre Öztürk, Abubakar Isa Adamu, Adem Yıldırım, Mehmet Kanık and Mehmet Bayındır were recognized for their poster, “Conical Bragg Fibers: Narrow Photonic Band Waveguides for Breath Analysis.” Their work comprised biomedical applications of the optoelectronic nose system developed in UNAM laboratories. The group was able to fabricate infrared photonic bandgap fibers that have very narrow transmission bands and demonstrated that the narrow band fibers can potentially be used to diagnose diabetes using breath samples from patients.