PhD student, Dylan Herzog wins Senior Colgate Prize with bacteria detection device

Congratulations to Dylan Herzog, winner of the BSODR Senior Colgate Prize – oral. The cash prize of £500 is awarded for the best verbal presentation by a dental researcher.  Dylan’s presentation was on the SafeRoot project, a device that will enable rapid bacterial detection during endodontic treatment.

The SafeRoot device was created to detect bacteria at the time of completion of a root canal treatment, hoping to eliminate persistent or secondary infections and further treatments. Currently there are no methods in use to detect bacterial presence within the root canal space in a fast and reliable manner, but making use of molecular florescent dyes and fluorescence microscopy / spectroscopy, SafeRoot can optically detect residual live bacteria from the complex morphology of the root canal space.

Dylan was also awarded a travel bursary prize of £5000 for his Department which may be used for PhD students to spend time in a research centre of excellence in the UK or abroad. The Swiss born postgraduate student originally trained as an automotion engineer, but moved to academia to study an undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Kent. He is currently completing his PhD at King’s and will take up a Postdoctoral post in the Tissue Engineering and Biophotonics Division at the Dental Institute.  

Supervisor Professor Tim Watson and Dylan Herzog