Malaysian student in London wins Wellcome Image Awards 2016

Who would have expected a Malaysian medical student in London who loves photography could have won a prestigious international photography award?

Izzat Fahimuddin Mohammed Suffian’s interest and passion in photography brought him luck when he was among the 20 winners of the Wellcome Image Awards 2016 held in the British capital recently.

First held in 1997, the international photography competition is organised annually to recognize researchers in biomedical sciences from around the world, successfully producing informative, interesting and amazing technical images where 20 best photos are selected as the winner.

The doctorate (PhD) student from King’s College London made the country proud when his image of two rod-shaped bacteria sitting on an extremely thin sheet of carbon (purple) through Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) imaging technique, won the heart of the judges, making him one of the 20 winners in the award this year.

Izzat, 26, teamed up with three of his university friends, Kuo-Ching Mei, Houmam Kafa dan Khuloud Al-Jamal to produce the winning image which took them two to three days to complete.

His win boosted Malaysia’s image as the photographs will be displayed at several locations in the United Kingdom and United States including at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He also won the same award in 2014 for producing a cancer treatment image in the form of electron micrograph from a cluster of breast cancer cells treated with nanometer-sized particles carrying anti-cancer drug, doxorubicin.

According to Izzat, it is difficult to obtain such images because it requires a complicated preparation method with sophisticated equipment needed to view very tiny particles of bacteria.

“The challenge that my team faced was when obtaining a perfect image of the grapheme oxide using electron microscopy technique due to its small size, in the form of an atom.

“However, due to an accidental procedure when preparing the sample, it allows us to capture images of the bacteria growth being wrapped by the grapheme oxide sheet,” he said when contacted by Astro AWANI recently.

Izzat said he started to indulge in micro-photography techniques during his undergraduate years when was pursuing Chemistry and Science at Kobe University, Japan - conducting research on cancer cells.

“I had interest in photography since my high school days. However, the interest towards scientific photography began when I was in university after learning about a technique called Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy.

“I was amazed on how a micro metered-sized cancer cell can be seen as an art and understanding how it behaves in our body. Since then, I develop the interest to produce micro images through microscope,” he said, hoping that more people would appreciate and understand life and health through those images.

The youngest of three siblings hailing from Gombak is a Public Service Department scholar.

He now studies at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King's College London, conducting research on Hepatitis B virus for the treatment of cancer as well as Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery.