Manjari Bhamidipati, a BME Ph.D. candidate, was awarded first prize in the J&J Engineering Showcase Graduate Student Poster Competition. Her work entitled "Biomedical Imaging Using SERS Tags: The Future Beyond Fluorescent Dyes” is part of a larger project in Professor Laura Fabris’ lab, which aims to implement the use of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) in clinical imaging and to identify cell phenotype modifications that can be correlated to disease progression. The approach has yielded exciting results which indicate that gold nanostars, which are known to provide bright imaging tags, are equally or less toxic than their spherical counterparts, and that, with a multiparametric analysis, it is possible to pinpoint the various toxicity mechanisms that might be elicited by these particles in the body. Manjari's thesis project focuses on the development of a spectroscopic method for the multi-marker identification of circulating tumor cells in blood.