Santosh Paidi and Saumya Tiwari Receive SAS Barbara Stull Graduate Student Awards at SciX

The Society for Applied Spectroscopy’s (SAS) Barbara Stull Graduate Student Award was presented to two students this year: Santosh Paidi of Johns Hopkins University and Saumya Tiwari of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The award, presented on October 15 at SciX 2019 in Palm Springs, California, is given to graduate students in honor of longtime SAS employee Barbara Stull, in recognition of outstanding research in the area of spectroscopy.

Paidi is a doctoral student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins, where his current research is in the application of Raman spectroscopy and multivariate data analysis to develop novel quantitative approaches for addressing unmet needs in the molecular study of cancers. Additionally, a major focus of Santosh’s graduate study is the development of a detection framework based on label-free plasmon-enhanced Raman spectroscopy for rapid identification of closely related human and murine antibody drugs during their manufacturing, with the ultimate goal of translation to fill-finish sites. His work has resulted in 13 peer-reviewed publications in various scientific journals.

Tiwari’s PhD in Bioengineering focused on applied spectroscopic imaging and computational analysis under Prof. Rohit Bhargava at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She focused her thesis on the development and application of spectroscopic imaging to determine patient outcomes in colon cancer, adding independently to the current clinical information provided by stage and grade. She has also worked on integrating genomic information with spectroscopic data to improve outcomes in surgical resections and on developing applied computational models to analyze spectroscopic imaging data. As the first author of three publications, and an author in several secondary publications, she continues her work on applying spectroscopic data to improve patient health and disease outcomes.