Biomedical engineer receives Friedman Award for Scholars in Health

UBC Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies has announced this year’s nine winners of the Friedman Award for Scholars in Health, and one of them is Hooman Esfandiari — a PhD candidate in biomedical engineering.

Esfandiari's primary research focuses on developing an automatic and robust process for assessing — in an intraoperative setting — how accurately a screw has been placed in the spine. Under the mentorship of Simon Weidert at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Esfandiari will implement a virtual reality system that reports precise positional information to orthopaedic surgeons by projecting a three-dimensional model of the intended implant onto the patient’s anatomy before the implant insertion. The objective is to improve surgical outcomes by avoiding inaccurate implantation.

The Friedman Award for Scholars in Health supports learning and research opportunities for graduate students or medical residents working in the broad area of health, to bring new perspectives to their education and further their career.

The award is named after two of the earliest faculty members in the UBC Faculty of Medicine. Dr. Sydney Friedman and his wife Dr. Constance Livingstone-Friedman believed that well-rounded and transformative education includes learning from different perspectives and cultures, and they wished to support such learning among UBC graduate students and medical residents.

Friedman Scholars receive funding for six or more months of study outside western Canada. Destinations for this year’s award winners include Harvard University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, King’s College, Johns Hopkins University and Dalhousie University.

Discover more Friedman Scholars.