Laura Bartha worked on a project that helps doctors treat people with cancer more effectively.

A fourth-year biomedical computing student was the only Canadian finalist for a prestigious North American computer research award, finishing alongside students from major U.S. universities such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

Laura Bartha, 21, was thrilled to be one of six finalists for the 2011 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.

“I wasn’t having a good day, then I saw the e-mail and I jumped up,” she says. “I didn’t think it would be this big of a deal. But when you see the people you are surrounded with – students from Harvard and Yale – it’s impressive.”

Ms Bartha is well-deserving of the honour, according to her research supervisor.

“Laura is an exceptionally bright, motivated and productive young medical image analysis researcher. She has the touch and feel for practical biomedical computing,” says Professor Gabor Fichtinger.

Ms Bartha was honoured for her work with Queen’s Percutaneous Surgery Lab helping improve cancer treatment. After a tumour is removed surgically, doctors insert a needle to kill the remaining cancer cells. Ms Bartha’s project work is part of a larger project that will allow doctors to see what they are doing because they currently carry out that procedure blind.

She started the project as part of a summer job and it soon extended into her undergrad research project.