Two ECE grads are recipients of NSERC's prestigious Alexander Graham Bell Award

Ms. Ioana Sevcenco won the prestigious NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship Award. The award represents a $35,000/year prize for a period of 2 years. Ioana received a M.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest. Her curiosity to see practical applications of Math in signal processing led her to complete a M.A.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UVic, working under the supervision of Dr. Panajotis Agathoklis. Since January 2012, Ioana is pursuing a PhD in the same department. Currently, Ioana is working on signal processing in the gradient domain, with applications in image and video editing, panoramic imaging, adaptive optics, and vision correction. In addition to the NSERC award, Ioana also received the departmental graduate teaching award and a University of Victoria graduate award in 2013, and two fellowship awards in 2012 and 2010 respectively.

Serge Vincent (MASc, Electrical Engineering) is numerically, theoretically, and experimentally characterizing nonlinear effects in optical microcavities within Dr. Tao Lu's lab. He is a recent recipient of the top tier NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship and has, in the past, been funded by a UVic Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research and 2 NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Awards.

Serge has authored and co-authored 4 journal papers as well as 1 book chapter. One of his goals is to address the fundamental challenges facing nanophotonic and plasmonic sensors towards developing the next generation of optical single-molecule detectors. He will carry this forward as he later pursues his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany, where he will contribute to the emerging field of plasmon-assisted whispering gallery mode biosensing.