The Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation benefits and supports cooperation between Austrian and American universities and academics by developing research projects and fellowships respectively with different American and Austrian universities. Simonjan graduated with her Ph.D. from Universitat Klagenfurt, a university located in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 2019. She is doing her postdoctoral work with the Broadband Networking Wireless Lab, led by ECE Professor Ian Akyildiz.

Simonjan received the award for her poster entitled “Localization and Tracking of In-body Bionanosensor Measurements via Inertial Positioning and THz Backscattering Communication,” which she co-authored with Akyildiz. Nanotechnology is enabling the development of a new generation of devices which are able to sense, process, and communicate, while being in the scale of tens to hundreds of cubic nanometers. Such small, imperceptible devices enhance not only current applications but enable entirely new paradigms, especially for in-body environments. 

This work introduces a localization and tracking concept for measurements of bionanosensors floating through the human bloodstream. Besides the nanoscale sensors, the proposed system also comprises macroscale anchor nodes attached to the skin of the monitored person. To realize autonomous localization and resource-efficient wireless communication between sensors and anchors, Simonjan and Akyildiz propose to rely on inertial positioning and sub-terahertz backscattering communication as major building blocks. Their proposed system is a first step towards early disease detection as it aims at localizing body regions which show anomalies.