Thesis Submission Congratulations: Well done, Alice Yu and the TRIP Photonic Stream team
We’re delighted to share some wonderful news from the TRIP Photonic Stream: a huge congratulations to the whole team on supporting the successful completion and submission of a Master’s thesis by Alice Yu.
Alice, a Master of Biomedical Science student, was jointly supervised by Dr Haruna Suzuki-Kerr and Dr Cushla McGoverin, with support from Professor Frederique Vanholsbeeck and Dr Marco Bonesi, and has been an extended and valued part of the Photonic Stream through her hands-on experimental work. It’s a real milestone for Alice as an emerging researcher, and a proud moment for everyone who contributed time, expertise, and encouragement along the way.
Alice’s thesis explored how optical coherence tomography (OCT) could be used to visualise the round window membrane in sheep (and benchmark against fixed human tissue), with a view to improving how we understand barriers to delivering treatments into the inner ear. This matters because sensorineural hearing loss still has limited drug-based treatment options, and while intratympanic drug delivery is promising, the round window membrane remains a key gateway that can influence how well therapies diffuse into the inner ear. Some studies also suggest an overlying mucosal layer could play a role in that variability, but it’s been difficult to assess these structures with technologies suited to real-time evaluation.
What made this project particularly challenging and impressive is how much Alice had to learn across disciplines. Her work included evaluating different OCT wavelengths in fixed tissue and carrying out structured qualitative and quantitative comparisons to better delineate the round window membrane and the mucosal layer. She took on the physics foundations behind OCT, learned how to operate specialised imaging equipment to collect high-quality datasets, and then did the demanding downstream work of extracting and processing image-derived data using MATLAB coding, followed by careful analysis and interpretation. This was hugely supported by Mr Suyash Mehta and Mr Darven Murali Tharan. Particularly impressive is the OCT system built entirely by Darven (see more on the website of the biophotonics team https://www.biophotonics-newzealand.com/).
Beyond the science, this is also a great example of what we aim for in TRIP: creating meaningful opportunities for postgraduate students to be embedded in a collaborative research programme, contributing to real translational questions while contributing to building deep science capability here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Alice’s thesis submission reflects her hard work and growth, and also the strength of the support network around her in the Photonic Stream.
Congratulations again, Alice—and congratulations to the TRIP Photonic Stream team for helping make this milestone happen. We’re also excited to share that Alice is continuing in the hearing space, now enrolled in the Master of Audiology at the University of Auckland, working toward becoming a clinical audiologist. We’ll be cheering her on for what comes next, and we wouldn’t be surprised if we see her back in research again.