Sean Rothenberger (right) receives the Fearnot-Laufman-Greatbatch Award from Kelsey Hopkins, a representative of the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Student Association. 

Originally called the Fearnot Prize and first presented in 1992, this award was established and funded by Neal E. Fearnot, president of MED Institute Incorporated and Cook Advanced Technologies, as well as vice president of Cook Group Incorporated.

Fearnot recognized the value of providing students with the opportunity to present their research after his own such experience as a graduate student. Today, second-year doctoral students in the Weldon School and in the Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences Program have the opportunity to present their research through the Summer Seminar series. Feedback from the audience is shared with the presenters as part of their graduate student training. The evaluation results are also summarized to determine the best presentation of the summer and the winner of the Fearnot-Laufman-Greatbatch Award.

This summer there were 17 excellent speakers. Rothenberger received the highest overall score and the highest average of all 12 questions on the evaluation form as well as the highest number of perfect scores.

His presentation was entitled “Multi-Modality Assessment of Cerebral Aneurysm Hemodynamics: Establishing 4D flow MRI Measurement Error.” Rothenberger is advised by Vitaliy Rayz, assistant professor of biomedical engineering. He was presented with the award on August 12, 2019, during new graduate student orientation.