Best Poster Award at MicroTAS 2025: International recognition for Caitlin Turney

Caitlin Turney, a doctoral student at the Laboratory for MEMS Applications, was awarded the Widmer Best Poster Award at Adelaide, Australia.

The prize is sponsored by the journal Lab on a Chip and honors the best-presented poster at the conference. A total of 555 posters were submitted, 90 of which made it to the shortlist.

Turneys's award-winning poster, entitled “Library Preparation Automation Using Centrifugal Microfluidics for Intraoperative Brain Tumor Classification from Sparse Epigenomic Data,” addresses a key challenge in neurosurgery: the need for rapid and reliable tumor classification during surgery. The poster presents an automated microfluidic workflow that combines centrifugal LabDisk technology with nanopore sequencing and machine learning. This enables methylation-based classification of central nervous system (CNS) tumors within the clinically critical time window of approximately one hour, making it suitable for intraoperative decision support. The work represents the first automated library preparation specifically designed for intraoperative classification of CNS tumors and lays the foundation for the future integration of additional steps such as automated DNA extraction.