        Susan began this work at McCormick under the advisership of Prof. Allen Taflove of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and continued to pursue it after receiving her Ph.D. and then starting her professorial career at Wisconsin-Madison. Unlike existing X-ray mammography techniques, Susan’s technology involves no painful breast compression, and no potentially cancer-causing ionizing radiation. It promises reliable detection of 2-mm malignant tumors having only onesixteenth the volume of tumors at the detectability threshold of X-rays. Detection at such an early stage would probably save thousands of women’s lives in the U.S. each year.

        Currently, Susan is pursuing her breast cancer research as the principal investigator of four significant grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Army Breast Cancer Research Program. She has forged collaborations with engineers, scientists, and physicians at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and elsewhere.

        Prior to being named to the MIT TR-100 list, Susan’s brilliant work already had achieved wide recognition. She had received the National Science Foundation CAREER and PECASE awards, and the Booker Award of the U.S. National Committee of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) as the outstanding young electromagnetics scientist in the U.S.

        Susan exemplifies the type of young person we are seeking for our HPUR. Furthermore, her achievements show what such a young person might accomplish as a result of his or her involvement in HPUR.

HPUR alumna Susan Hagness (Ph.D. 1998), currently a tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was named by MIT as one of the world’s top 100 technologists under the age of 35. Her citation, which appeared in the June 2002 issue of Technology Review, MIT’s Magazine of Innovation, focused on her research in early-stage breast cancer detection using a novel ultrawideband radar technology.
	Susan began this work at McCormick under the advisership of Prof. Allen Taflove of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and continued to pursue it after receiving her Ph.D. and then starting her professorial career at Wisconsin-Madison. Unlike existing X-ray mammography techniques, Susan’s technology involves no painful breast compression, and no potentially cancer-causing ionizing radiation. It promises reliable detection of 2-mm malignant tumors having only onesixteenth the volume of tumors at the detectability threshold of X-rays. Detection at such an early stage would probably save thousands of women’s lives in the U.S. each year. Currently, Susan is pursuing her breast cancer research as the principal investigator of four significant grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Army Breast Cancer Research Program. She has forged collaborations with engineers, scientists, and physicians at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and elsewhere. Prior to being named to the MIT TR-100 list, Susan’s brilliant work already had achieved wide recognition. She had received the National Science Foundation CAREER and PECASE awards, and the Booker Award of the U.S. National Committee of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) as the outstanding young electromagnetics scientist in the U.S. Susan exemplifies the type of young person we are seeking for our HPUR. Furthermore, her achievements show what such a young person might accomplish as a result of his or her involvement in HPUR.