Biology Winner
Pavel Yarmolenko: Beginning in high school and during his undergraduate studies, Mr. Yarmolenko worked under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Dewhirst at Duke University. In December of 2005, Mr. Yarmolenko received a B.S. in Biology and a B.A. in Music from University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
In 2006, Mr. Yarmolenko began his graduate studies at Duke University under Dr. Dewhirst's guidance. His research was supported initially by a graduate fellowship in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and later by an NIH Biomedical and Tissue Engineering Predoctoral Fellowship. Mr. Yarmolenko received the Society for Thermal Medicine New Investigator Award in 2009, which gave him the opportunity to co-chair the Young Investigators Session at the annual meeting of the society. Also in 2009, Mr. Yarmolenko received an intramural research trainee award, which has been supporting his graduate research under the combined mentorship of both Dr. Dewhirst at Duke University and Dr. Bradford Wood at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD.
Mr. Yarmolenko's research seeks to quantify the dependence of drug delivery to solid tumors on image-able tissue transport parameters. Towards this goal, he has worked on preparation and characterization of image-able thermally sensitive liposomes and on software and hardware development for MR-guided high intensity focused ultrasound (MR-HIFU). A combination of these technologies may allow for spatio-temporal control of drug delivery and help test dependence of drug delivery on tissue transport parameters in solid tumors.
Clinical Winner
Dr. Martine Franckena, MD, PHD: She received her medical degree from Erasmus University, the Netherlands, in November 2003. After short visits to the departments of Internal Medicine and Neurology she landed at the Hyperthermia Unit of the Department of Radiation Oncology to start her Ph.D. thesis on Deep Hyperthermia in the treatment of cervix cancer with sponsorship of the Dutch Cancer Society. Currently, she is a third year resident at the department of Radiation Oncology and successfully defended her thesis in September 2010. Besides her clinical work, her current areas of interest include Gynaecologic Oncology and deep and head and neck hyperthermia.
Physics/Engineering Winner
Ms. Astrid Gasselhuber: She received an M.Sc. degree in Computer Science in Applied Medicine from the Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria, in October 2007. Following, she became a doctoral student of Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria. Since 2008 she has been a visiting graduate student at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston (SC), USA, where she has worked on her dissertation research under supervision of Dr. Dieter Haemmerich. In 2009 Astrid received the New Investigator Award of the Society for Thermal Medicine (STM) annual meeting, and in 2010 she had the opportunity to co-chair the Young Investigator's Session at the annual STM meeting.
Astrid's current research interest is in mathematical modeling of targeted drug delivery of the chemotherapeutic agent doxorubicin. Goals are to understand the delivery of doxorubicin encapsulated in low temperature sensitive liposomes combined with thermal treatment, by using computational models to calculate the release of drug from liposomes, model various transport mechanisms, and determine drug concentrations in tumor tissue, normal tissue, and plasma.