Sim4Life Student Competition 2025 Winners

January 20, 2026

Our search for the best student simulation project of 2025 is complete! After a close and thorough review, we are happy to announce the winners of this year’s Sim4Life Student Competition:

1st Prize:

Elizaveta Shegurova, EPFL, Switzerland, is awarded USD 3,000 for her work entitled "Wearable, Twisted-Pair Coil Arrays for Multi-Modal MRI". As part of her Master’s thesis, Elizaveta successfully evaluated the theoretical performance of an integrated 32-channel electroencephalography (EEG) cap combined with a wearable 10-channel receive and 8-channel transmit/receive dipole array. The project combined high-quality in silico modeling with experimental validation to address complex parallel receive coil systems, full EEG electrode and cabling configurations, and comprehensive electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure assessment. Fundamental modeling practices such as convergence analysis and precise tuning and matching of transmit and receive coils were successfully carried out. Through this work, Elizaveta demonstrated exceptional work with Sim4Life to investigate advanced wearable coil technologies for simultaneous EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies at 7 Tesla. An impressive study for her Master’s thesis!

2nd Prize:

Paul S. Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania, USA, is awarded USD 2,000 for his work entitled "Reduction of Radiofrequency Induced Implant Heating via Flexible Metasurface Shielding at 7 T". In this work, Paul and his collaborators used Sim4Life to design and investigate the shielding performance of flexible metasurfaces acting as electric-field shields to enhance implant safety during MRI examinations. They conducted comprehensive numerical simulations with phantom and human body models to quantify differences in dosimetric exposure metrics in the vicinity of the implant. The study further evaluated temperature increases with and without metasurfaces, as well as a control material, and assessed imaging performance by comparing results with experimental validation.

3rd Prize

Robin Wydaeghe, Ghent University, Belgium, is awarded USD 1,000 for his work entitled "GOLIAT: Comprehensive Automated Near- and Far-Field SAR Assessments Using Sim4Life”. Robin developed a sophisticated Python framework, GOLIAT, that fully automates EMF dosimetry simulations and the extraction of key exposure metrics such as the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR). The framework enables end-to-end simulation workflows for near-field and far-field exposure scenarios with anatomical human phantoms and complex sources. Robin successfully demonstrated how Sim4Life can be extended to create reproducible, scalable, and user-friendly simulation tools that significantly reduce manual intervention while improving the statistical significance of simulation results.

Congratulations and a big round of applause to the winners! 

We would like to thank everyone who participated in the competition and look forward to receiving your Sim4Life projects for the Sim4Life Student Competition 2026. More information is available here.

The Sim4Life Team