The Senior Colgate Prize represents the most coveted PhD-level UK research prize for Oral & Dental Research, and adds to a long history of prize-winning students from the School at BSODR.
Hanya's talk was titled "Digital analysis of oral dysplasia to aid early cancer detection" and described work carried out as part of her PhD and NIHR Doctoral Research Fellowship supervised by Professor Syed Ali Khurram. Her research has applied a range of digital, computational and quantitative approaches to reveal new insights into the progression of oral precancer to malignancy.
This research has led to the development of oral cancer risk prediction models which have already shown to be potentially more reliable than existing ‘gold standard’ grading systems for oral precancer. Future work will aim to prospectively validate these models.
Hanya has been invited to represent the British Division in the Hatton Competition and is looking forward to presenting her research at the International Association for Dental Research Meeting in New Orleans, USA in Spring 2024.
I was delighted to hear of Hanya's success in the Senior Colgate competition. Hanya's research applies cutting edge computational approaches to the prediction of the risk of developing oral cancer from pre-malignant lesions, not all of which progress to cancer. This has the potential to offer a step change in the way these patients are treated, improving their quality of life and reducing the risk of developing oral cancer, a devastating and increasingly common disease.​​​​
Professor Dan Lambert
Interim Dean of the School of Clinical Dentistry