Awards and Honors: July 14, 2009

Posted 03:19 PM, July 14, 2009, by jaruiz

Laura Sasportas, PhD candidate in the Multimodality Molecular Imaging Laboratory, has been awarded a Student Fellowship Award by the Society of Nuclear Medicine . She received this award for her proposal, "In Vivo Molecular Imaging of Circulating Tumor Cells and Early Invasion in a Human Cancer-Stem Cell Based Model of Breast Tumor." SNM Student Fellowship Awards support full-time participation in clinical and basic research activities for students who demonstrate outstanding competence in nuclear medicine and/or molecular imaging research.

A native of Strasbourg, France, Laura Sasportas completed two years of math and physics studies at the bachelor's degree level before entering Ecole Centrale Paris, which is a multidisciplinary engineering school. She was then selected for the Top Industrial Managers for Europe (T.I.M.E.) master's double degree program, Europe's leading network for the training of bi-cultural and bilingual engineers. In 2007, Ms. Sasportas received a Master of Science Engineering Diploma from the Ecole Centrale Paris, and a Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). At ETH Zurich, she specialized in bioimaging, magnetic resonance imaging, and molecular imaging. Dr. Sasportas completed her master's thesis at the Harvard Medical School Center for Molecular Imaging Research (MGH) in Boston, Massachusetts. Her thesis aimed at developing and imaging in vivo an anti-angiogenic therapy for malignant brain tumors using human neural stem cells as a delivery vehicle.

In 2008, Ms. Sasportas worked as a scientific associate at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research/Center for Proteomics Chemistry on the lead discovery platform in Basel, Switzerland. She was in charge of cell-line engineering and support of the imaging-based cellular assay development for high-throughput drug screening. Later that year, Ms. Sasportas was also awarded an International Fulbright Science and Technology Award grant to pursue a PhD in bioengineering at Stanford University, where she is currently enrolled.

Her hobbies include literature, theater, drawing, painting, swimming, hiking, and traveling.