CS Graduate Student Wins Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Award

Mr. Aaron Ward, under the supervision of Dr. Ghassan Hamarneh, has won a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (MSFHR) Senior Graduate Studentship Award.

MSFHR is a major provincial funding agency supporting health research in British Columbia. Aaron is distinguished as the recipient of one of only 15 awards given to SFU students (out of a total of 174 awards granted), and the only awardee who is working in Computing Science. This is a major award that will fully support Aaron's research for a period of 14 months.

Aaron is Ph.D. student in SFU's Medical Image Analysis Lab; his work is focused on anatomical shape analysis. This involves collaboration with medical researchers at New York University and University of British Columbia to design and develop novel mathematical and computational tools to strengthen the interface between medicine and computing.

The aim is to better enable medical researchers to extract medically useful information from the wealth of medical image data being produced. Through the development of shape descriptors that capture intuitive and medically relevant aspects of anatomical shapes, we provide useful visualizations and quantitative analysis leading to a better understanding of the relationship between anatomical shape and pathology.

For the duration of Aaron's MSFHR award, he will collaborate with researchers at the University of British Columbia to investigate the use of shape of basal ganglia structures as a biomarker for Parkinson's Disease (PD). There is currently no reliable biomarker for PD; this is currently an area of intensive research as it enables the early diagnosis and tracking of the progression of the disease in response to treatment.

For more info:
http://mial.fas.sfu.ca/researchProject.php?s=188
http://mial.fas.sfu.ca/researchProject.php?s=332