Professor Pia Marie S.P. Albano, PhD is the 2022 recipient of the National Science and Technology Week Outstanding Research and Development Award (Applied Research Category), and thus received the Julian Banzon medal from President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. and Department of Science and Technology Secretary Renato U. Solidum, Jr., PhD. The award was conferred on the occasion of the National Science and Technology Week, which was held at the World Trade Center in Pasay City.
The award-winning work was “AI-enhanced cancer diagnostics using FTIR spectroscopy.” Albano, whose work has focused on infectious agents that cause cancer, has also investigated biomarkers of cancer and contributed to the field of cancer genomics. Some of her research highlights are the association between chronic infections and cancer, biomarker discovery, characterization of point mutations and structural alterations in a wide range of cancers, and Fourier Transformed Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy as a novel technique for rapid diagnosis of cancer.Albano, an academic researcher of the Research Center for the Natural and Applied Sciences, teaches at the Department of Biological Sciences of the College of Science and the Sciences cluster of the Graduate School.