Young Research Award: Using optical technologies in the fight against bowel cancer

Dr. Alba Alfonso Garcia, a young woman with glasses and chin-length hair, presents her certificate. President Hornegger stands next to her.
Prof. Joachim Hornegger, President of FAU, presents the SAOT Young Researcher Award 2025 to Dr. Alba Alfonso García. (image: FAU/Boris Mijat)

The photonics hub at FAU awards 100,000 euros to a promising young researcher.

Dr. Alba Alfonso García is the winner of the Young Researcher Award in Advanced Optical Technologies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). The prize is worth 100,000 euros. With the Young Researcher Award, the Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT) at FAU recognizes early career researchers for their outstanding research, invites them for a research stay and allocates funding for them to implement their research ideas.  

In her project “Multiscale Label-Free Optical Imaging for Inflammatory Bowel Disease Detection” Alba García intends to improve the diagnosis of bowel cancer and chronic inflammatory bowel diseases using various optical technologies. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis. During her stay in Erlangen she will mainly collaborate with the Chair of Medical Biotechnology.

“The Young Researcher Award represents everything that we hope to promote with SAOT.” Innovative ideas from young researchers are the key to tomorrow’s technological developments,” explains Prof. Dr. Michael Schmidt, Director and Coordinator of SAOT.

A further six doctoral candidates at FAU were also honored for their outstanding publications. The SAOT Student Awards worth 1000 euros each were presented to Soyeon Jun, Albert These, Julius Jander, Marcel Müller, Patrick Schmidt and Dongqin Ni. Phillipp Bräuer and Benjamin Klevansky received the “SAOT Innovation Award”. For their project titled “Time-gated Raman Spectroscopy for Sustainable Fuel Characterization and Process Monitoring”, they received funding of 20,000 euros as well as prize money of a total of 2000 euros.

Interdisciplinary hub for research into photonics

Since 2006, SAOT has acted as an interdisciplinary hub for research into photonics and optical technologies. As part of FAU, it offers an outstanding training program for doctoral candidates from all over the world based on workshops, seminars and academies. That apart, it increases the public visibility of research into photonics and optical technologies in Erlangen, for example with its FAU Science Center panOPTICUM.

The winners, 2 young men, and Hornegger, a man in his 50s, and Gmelch, a young scientist, received a large check with the prize money of 20,000 euros and 2 certificates.1/4
Dr. Alba Alfonso Garcia, a young woman with glasses and chin-length hair, presents her certificate. President Hornegger stands next to her.2/4
President hornegger in a dark blue suit with guest speaker Fujimoto, a gray-haired Asian, with an award of thanks3/4
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Further information:

Dr. Max Gmelch
Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT)
Phone: +49 9131 85 25855
max.gmelch@fau.de

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