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Winter of light

24 June 2009

PhD student Julio Cao will attend a three-day winter school at the Australian Synchrotron along with fellow PhD student Rohini Shakar.

Two Monash PhD students have been chosen to participate in the Australian Synchrotron's inaugural winter school from 13 to 16 July.

Only 50 places were offered to students across Australia and New Zealand to attend the program.

Julie Cao from the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories, and Rohini Shankar from the School of Physics, will attend lectures by Australian Synchrotron scientists and gain an understanding of applications and techniques that use synchrotron light to probe the nature of matter.

The students will also perform beamline experiments and learn about sample mounting, data acquisition and interpretation of results.

Ms Cao's PhD research is utilising spectroscopic methods to identify the unique chemical signatures of undifferentiated human embryonic stem-cells.

"I will perform mapping experiments using the infrared beamline at the Australian Synchrotron and at the later stages of my PhD will carry out measurements on the facility's other beamlines," Ms Cao said.

"The training provided by the winter school will be critical to achieving these milestones, thus enabling me to contribute to the fast-moving field of stem-cell research."

Ms Shankar's PhD research will see the development of new methods of computed tomography using energy sensitive detectors that are currently under development at the Monash Centre for Synchrotron Science.

By detecting the energies as well as the intensities of the X-rays, Ms Shankar hopes to be able to increase the amount of diagnostic information provided in patient CT scans. She will use the synchrotron to obtain X-rays of a single energy to develop and test her new methods in preparation for later implementation in clincal scanners, which use multi-energy X-rays.

The Australian Synchrotron, which came online in 2007, is situated in the innovation precinct, opposite the University's Clayton campus .