Bilkent EEE Ph.D. graduate Dr. Polat Göktaş received the 2021 Serhat Özyar Young Scientist of the Year Award.
Dr. Polat Göktaş has received the award for his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Development of an Experimental Image Processing Tool and Flow-Cytometry Based Electromagnetic Scattering Analysis for Medical Diagnosis of Red Blood Cell Pathology” under the supervision of Prof. Vakur B. Ertürk and Prof. Ayhan Altıntaş.
The METU Serhat Özyar Young Scientist of the Year Award is given by Orta Doğu Öğretim Elemanları Derneği. For more information, please see http://www.oed.org.tr/oed/?p=1316.
Dr. Goktas’ Ph.D. research is a highly interdisciplinary mix of image acquisition, image processing, data analysis, and life sciences. His main project was on the analysis and experimental study of single biological cells especially for red blood cells, to identify structures without staining for label-free, high throughput classification and detection of cellular information at the single-cell level, especially for in vitro diagnostic research. This award adds to Dr. Goktas’ prior accolades including a Fulbright Doctoral Research fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical Hospital, and IEEE AP-S Doctoral Research Grant for the 2017-18 year and the 2019 Leopold B. Felsen Excellence in Electromagnetics award.
He is currently undertaking a Marie Skłodowska–Curie Career-FIT PLUS fellowship with funding from Enterprise Ireland and the European Union under the MSCA- COFUND scheme. His project is part of a strategic partnership between CeADAR Ireland, University College Dublin, and ValitaCell, an Irish biotechnology company.