MSIT-SE Student Recognized at NCWIT
By Josh Quicksall
Prachi Shah, a graduate student in the Master of Science in Information Technology - Software Engineering program, was recently given honorable mention for the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Collegiate Award during the 2018 NCWIT Summit on Women and IT in Dallas, Texas.
Housed at the University of Colorado’s ATLAS Institute, the NCWIT is a national non-profit organization that works to increase the meaningful participation of girls and women in computing.
The NCWIT Collegiate Award is an annually conferred award which recognizes technical contributions to projects that demonstrate a high level of innovation and potential impact.
Shah’s project, “VOXEL - A Tool to Plan Brain Surgeries”, addresses limitations in the visualization tools currently in use by neurosurgeons to plan and prepare for brain surgery. Using 3D printing and virtual reality technologies, VOXEL allows researchers to forgo traditional boilerplate planning modalities by creating a precise, one-to-one physical model of a specific patient’s brain. This approach allows neurosurgeons to more closely tailor their surgical approach to the unique physical characteristics of each individual patient’s brain, greatly reducing the risk of misaligned presurgical planning.
To learn more about Shah’s project, check out a video overview of her team’s work on YouTube.
Prachi Shah (pictured back row, third from left) alongside other recipients, recieved an honorable mention at the 2018 NCWIT Summit on Women and IT for her brain imaging project, VOXEL.