MITRE's Hwang and Mullen Receive IEEE Best Paper Award

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

BEDFORD, Mass., November 29, 2010 — The MITRE Corporation is pleased to announce that Grace Hwang and Elaine Mullen have received the 2010 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Sensors Council. The award was presented during the IEEE Sensors Conference in Waikoloa, Hawaii, on Nov. 3.

IEEE is the world's largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. It is well-known for its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities.

Hwang, a principal biosensors scientist, and Mullen, a senior systems engineer, received the award for their paper "Plasmonic Sensing of Biological Analytes Through Nanoholes," published in IEEE Sensors Journal in December 2008. The paper, coauthored by Dr. Lin Pang and Professor Yeshaiahu Fainman of the Ultrafast & Nanoscale Optics Group of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), describes a novel design for a tiny sensor using charge density waves on a gold nanohole array that can detect biomolecules, including air- and water-borne pathogens, in real time. (In 2009, the paper also received MITRE's Ronald Fante Best Paper Award.)

According to Hwang, the research described in the paper is significant for MITRE and its sponsors in two ways: It dispenses with the use of labels, or fluorescent antibodies, to visualize the capture of pathogens; instead, it utilizes glycoproteins, molecules made up of a carbohydrate and a protein. The end result is a pathogen-sensing system that is more environmentally robust, faster, and more cost-effective than its predecessors.

"The work reported in this paper is both novel and of high technical quality, and the research makes a fundamental contribution to the development of single-particle sensors for biological agents," said MITRE Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Steve Huffman.

The IEEE Sensors Council Best Paper award is based on general quality, originality, contributions, subject matter and timeliness. Winners are presented with a certificate and $2,000 split equally among the authors.

About The MITRE Corporation

The MITRE Corporation (www.mitre.org) is a not-for-profit organization that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Homeland Security, with principal locations in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va.

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