Allison Schaap, PhD student in the Micro-and Nano-Scale Engineering research group of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at TU Eindhoven, has won the prize for "Best Student Oral Presentation" during the 3rd European Optical Society Topical Meeting on Blue Photonics last week.

She received this award for her research into the development of a glass-based optofluidic microsystem for the automatic classification of phytoplankton. This is not the first award she has received for her research. She also won the “Best Student Oral Presentation Award” for her research during the EOS Conference on Optofluidics in 2011.

Phytoplankton is one of the main producers of oxygen and thus very important to us. Small changes in our environment can have a significant impact on the amount and type of algae present in a particular piece of water. The research of Allison focuses on a fast, low-cost method to monitor these changes, and ultimately to predict the changes. For this she uses various techniques, such as microfabrication methods, optics, microfluidics and pattern recognition.

The research project is supported by the TU/e Excellence Fund (granted to Dr. Yves Bellouard), the department of Mechanical Engineering and the European Commission Femtoprint project.