Ocean Optics (Dunedin, Florida) has named Gabriel Orsinger of the University of Arizona (Tuscon, Arizona) as the winner of the 2014 Ocean Optics Young Investigator Award.

The award is presented to a researcher who is a graduate student or has completed their graduate work in the last five years and is the primary author of the best juried paper submitted as part of the “Colloidal Quantum Dots for Biomedical Applications IX” conference at the 2014 BiOS/Photonics West Symposium. The honor includes a $1000 investigator reward and a company grant to the investigator’s advisor.

Orsinger was honored for his work with advisor Marek Romanowski, a research assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Arizona Cancer Center, as presented in the paper “Intracellular light-induced release of signaling molecules from gold-coated liposomes.” Their work describes the use of gold-coated liposomes as a tool for studying cellular behavior as it relates to cancer and other diseases.