Congress Prizes

The Optica Foundation Student Paper Competition 

The congress recognizes the next generation of scientists through a student presentation competition. To qualify for an award, the paper must have been presented by an undergraduate or graduate student of an educational institution of collegiate grade.

The papers submitted to the competition were reviewed during the standard Technical Program Committee (TPC) review process and up to 4 finalists were selected. After the papers are presented, the Program Committee members will make their selections based on content quality, value to the technical community of interest and the students' presentation skills.

Congratulations to the Winners!

Clinical and Translational Biophotonics (Translational)

Chloe T. Zhang, University of Rochester, USA
Sunday, April 26, 2026, 8:30 - 8:45 AM
Multi-modal Neuromonitoring with Diffuse Optics and EEG for Early Detection of Brain Injury in Adults on Veno-arterial Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation

Microscopy, Histopathology and Analytics (Microscopy)

Shuyuan Zheng, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, USA
Wednesday, April 29, 14:45 - 15:00
Sequential Single-Fluorophore STORM for Highly Multiplexed Nanoscale Protein Mapping

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)

Emi Hughes, The University of Adelaide, Australia
Monday, April 27, 14:30 - 14:45
Improving Contrast at Depth using Spatially-Offset Optical Coherence Tomography (SO-OCT)

Optical Tomography and Spectroscopy (OT&S)

Ana Perez, Boston University, USA
Tuesday, April 28, 09:15 - 09:30
Parameter Optimization for Wearable and Fiber-less Speckle Contrast Optical Spectroscopy

Optics and the Brain (Brain)

Pin Hao Cheng, University of Minnesota, USA
Sunday, April 26, 09:15 - 09:30
Robotic-2p: A Robotically Actuated Microscope for Advanced Two-Photon Imaging in Freely Locomoting Mice

And

Caitlyn Davis, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Sunday, April 26, 14:45 - 15:00
Using Advanced Diffuse Optical Spectroscopies to Investigate the Link Between Fetal and Postnatal Cerebral Hemodynamics

Optica Emerging Economy Paper Prize  

Individuals from emerging economies can opt in during the submission process of any Optica meeting to be considered for special recognition of their presentation.  Honorees will be featured on the meetings website and in an upcoming issue of the OPN Journal.  Highly scored presenters from emerging economies will be selected for the recognition.

Congratulations to the Winners!

Tugba Nur Bozkurt, Yeditepe Universitesi, Turkey
Tuesday, April 28, 2026, 15:30 - 17:00
Performance Disparities in Very Deep Super-Resolution Learning for Malignant versus Benign Breast Histopathological Images

Nishant Goyal, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India
Tuesday, April 28, 2026, 15:30 - 17:00
Axial Structured Illumination Tomography (ASIT): A 3D Label-free Phase Imaging Technique

Muskan Kularia, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India
Tuesday, April 28, 2026, 15:30 - 17:00
A Regularization Penalty Based on Laguerre-Gaussian Hilbert Transform for Artifact-Free Image Reconstruction

Favour Oluwafemi Oni, Achievers University, Nigeria
Monday, April 27, 2026, 15:30- 17:00
LumiCare: A Low-Cost Machine Learning–Based Optical Imaging Framework Integrating Skin and Sclera Features for Non-Invasive Neonatal Hyperbilirubinemia Detection