December 2018

SEMS bids farewell to Prof Ton Peijs

After nearly 20 years of great service to QMUL, we announce that Prof. Ton Peijs will be leaving SEMS for a new role at Warwick University in January 2019. Ton has been an inspirational research leader in SEMS, not only evidenced through his research group which has clearly had a significant impact ... [more]

Congratulations to Qiang Sheng

Congratulations to Qiang Sheng who has successfully passed his PhD viva on a thesis entitled Molecular Dymanics Simulation of Surface Condensation on Solid Surface. He was supervised by Prof. Huasheng Wang and Prof. Wen Wang. He is currently a post-docotral research associate at the University of Edinburgh, working with Prof. ... [more]

Queen Mary University of London ranked in the top 125 institutions for engineering and technology subjects in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings

Queen Mary has climbed from the top 150 institutions for engineering and technology subjects into the top 125 according to this year's Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. The THE World University Rankings is the definitive list of the top universities globally, which includes more than 1,250 institutions across 86 countries in 2019. The ... [more]

November 2018

New video report on soft robotics for keyhole surgery

Breaking news on the EU robotics project STIFF-FLOP Research on soft robotics for keyhole surgery by Professor Althoefer, head of Advanced Robotics @ Queen Mary (ARQ) is highlighted in the new TechRepublic video on '5 things to know about soft robotics': 1. It doesn't mean pillows. 2. Search and rescue. 3. Medicine. (STIFF-FLOP features ... [more]

Congratulations to Yaqiong Wang

Congratulations to Dr. Yaqiong Wang who successfully completed her PhD viva on Monday 27 Nov 2018, with thesis entitled 'Effect of Polar Structure on Photocatalytic Properties of Oxide Powders and Films'. She was supervised by Haixue Yan, Steve Dunn and Joe Briscoe. [more]

Yinping Tao passes her PhD

Yinping Tao has successfully completed her PhD viva today on a thesis entitled, "Predicting the fatigue life and introducing structural health monitoring in cord reinforced rubber composites." She was supervised by James Busfield and Emiliano Bilotti and was also significantly supported by Ton Peijs and Han Zhang. Yinping's work has ... [more]

Congratulations to Marta Godinho!

Marta Godinho has successfully completed her PhD viva today on a thesis entitled, "Investigating the role of elastin in tendon mechanics." She was supervised by Hazel Screen and Steve Greenwald with significant input from Chavaunne Thorpe, and was recipient of the Bonfield Scholarship though the Institute of Bioengineering. Marta has ... [more]

Liz Tanner attends Service to celebrate Year of Engineering

Liz Tanner was one of the 2000 guests at the ecumenical "National Service to Celebrate the Year of Engineering" held at Westminster Abbey. The address was given by Dame Anne Dowling OM DBDE FRS FREng President of the Royal Academy of Engineering. One of the lessons was read by Chris Grayling, ... [more]

Professor Kaspar Althoefer elected to serve as member of IEEE Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) Administrative Committee.

Althoefer is among six RAS members elected by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers membership to serve a three-year term beginning 1 January 2019. You can find more information about the IEEE RAS AdCom here: http://www.ieee-ras.org/about-ras/governance/administrative-committee [more]

Yi Liu passes her PhD

Yi Liu has successfully completed her PhD viva today with a thesis entitled, "Flexible Self-regulating Heating Composites." She was supervised by Emiliano Bilotti and James Busfield but was also significantly supported by Han Zhang and Ton Peijs. Yi's work on optimising the mechanical and pyroresistive behaviour of conductive polymer composites ... [more]

Hugh Boys passes his PhD

Hugh Boys has passed his PhD today. His project was funded by the EPSRC MAT Programme grant. The examiners (Giuseppe Zurlo, National University of Ireland and Kaspar Althoefer, QMUL) noted, "Hugh did a lot of thorough work. The systems engineering was very impressive combining a low-cost tracking system, tactile rendering ... [more]

Industrial Liaison Forum

The biannual Industrial Liaison Forum was held on Wednesday November 14th in the Octagon. The event was well attended with over sixty industrialists from over forty organisations attending. The event was broken up into four parts, starting in the morning with the PhD research poster exhibition, followed by the annual ... [more]

Two Materials Graduates win National Awards

Adaeze Siwoniku has been awarded the Royal Charter Award of the IOM3 for being the best materials graduate in the UK in 2018 and Ruhi Patel has been awarded the RH Craven Award of the IOM3 for being the best graduate in the UK in Polymer Materials. James Busfield noted, "It ... [more]

Queen Mary jointly hosts Sino-UK Symposium on advanced materials and structures

Nine academics from Queen Mary University of London presented at the Sino-UK Symposium attended by prestigious researchers and enterprises in thermoelectrics and advanced materials from China and the United Kingdom. The Sino-UK Symposium on Advanced Materials and Structures and UK-China Partnership Forum in Themoelectrics and Clean Energy took place in ... [more]

Congrats to Kathrin Preuß

Congratulations to Kathrin Preuß who has passed her PhD viva. Kathrin's PhD thesis was titled "Platinum-free electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction in fuel cells" and her supervisor was Magda Titirici.

October 2018

Congratulations to Ying Tu

Congratulations to Ying Tu who passed his PhD viva on Wednesday 24th October 2018. Ying did his PhD on the "Investigation of ZnO nanorods as chemical and biological sensors" under the supervision of Steffi Krause and Joe Briscoe. [more]

Professor Cees Bastiaansen awarded Swinburne Medal from Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining.

Professor Cees Bastiaansen was awarded the Swinburne medal on Tuesday evening at a gala dinner at the IOM3 HQ in London. The award recognises the achievement of a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement and knowledge of any field related to the science, engineering or technology ... [more]

Queen Mary Principal awarded prestigious Honorary Professorship in China

Professor Colin Bailey, President and Principal of Queen Mary University of London, has been awarded an Honorary Professorship by Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in China.  Other recipients of the Honorary Professorships included Nobel Prize Laureates Mario Molina (Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995) and Shuji Nakamura (Nobel Prize for Physics in 2014). ... [more]

Designing a better raincoat

Work lead by Lorenzo Botto and Rafael Castrejón-Pita has been featured in a piece on Physics Today. Water-repellent clothing is designed to keep water droplets out while letting humidity escape.Hydrophobic fabric meets both requirements, but in striking a balance between them, it fails to repel water completely. When ... [more]

We Are Engineers Family Festival at the Science Museum this weekend

Dr Ana Jorge Sobrido's proposal on Redox Flow Batteries has been selected to conduct a leading activity at the Science Museum Family Festival, an event that celebrates the Year of Engineering 2018. Ana, other colleagues and students from QMUL will be at the Science Museum on the dates 20th and 21st ... [more]

Professor Kaspar Althoefer awarded Turing Fellowship

Professor Kaspar Althoefer has been awarded an Alan Turing Institute Fellowship. https://www.turing.ac.uk/people/researchers/kaspar-althoefer

Professor Kaspar Althoefer interviewed about robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery.

Professor Kaspar Althoefer was interviewed about his research on soft robotics for robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery. "We wanted to take our inspiration from biology – so octopus tentacles were our inspiration....making something that was made of soft materials, to achieve more dexterous behaviour but also to increase patient safety." The ... [more]

Queen Mary researchers nominated for £200K science prize

Two researchers from Queen Mary University of London are part of a team that is shortlisted to win a £200,000 science prize for their work in creating sustainable energy storage technologies from palm tree residue in Colombia.  Professor Magda Titirici and co-investigator Dr Ana Jorge Sobrido, both from Queen Mary’s ... [more]

September 2018

Congratulations to Giovanni Santagiuliana

Congratulations to Dr. Giovanni Santagiuliana who passed his PhD viva on Fri 21 Sept. Giovanni did a PhD on "Preparation, Characterisation, and Modelling of Graphene-based Polymer Nanocomposites with Enhanced Mechanical and Electrical Properties" under the supervision of Emiliano Bilotti, Nicola Pugno and Ton Peijs. [more]

Liz Tanner Returns to QMUL

After just over 11 years at the University of Glasgow, Liz Tanner has returned to School of Engineering and Materials Science to become the first Bonfield Professor of Biomedical Materials. Liz's first job was as a post doc in Bill Bonfield's Biomaterials Group, before the foundation of the IRC in Biomedical ... [more]

Organ-on-a-Chip Network launch a great success

The UK Organ-on-a-Chip Network official launch took place last week. On the 6th of September there was a conference day, held in conjunction with the BioMedEng18 Conference, taking place at Imperial College London and followed by a launch day at Queen Mary’s Graduate Centre on Friday the 7th. This ... [more]

August 2018

PhD success for Anuroopa Kalyan

PhD student, Anuroopa Kalyan has successfully defended her PhD thesis on the topic "Theoretical Modelling of Broadband Shock Associated Noise in Supersonic Jets", she was supervised by Dr. Sergey Karasbov. Anuroopa has already started her first post-doctoral appointment at the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre in Southampton. Congratulations Anuroopa! [more]

Jens-Dominik Mueller teaches adjoint methods at Cambridge Summer School

Jens gave a 3-day Summer School, "An introduction to gradient-based optimisation, adjoint methods and Automatic Differentiation", organised by the Special Interest Group on Numerical Optimisation with Fluids at Cambridge, 8-10 August 2018. 20 students from the UK and the EU attended. The SIG is offering the training material at http://signumopt.sems.... [more]

Scientists design material that can store energy like an eagle’s grip

What do a flea and an eagle have in common? They can store energy in their feet without having to continuously contract their muscles to then jump high or hold on to prey. Now scientists at Queen Mary University of London and University of Cambridge have created materials that can ... [more]

Colleagues from Queen Mary University of London Engineering School of Northwestern Polytechnical University (QMES) visit Mile End

Colleagues from the Queen Mary University of London Engineering School of Northwestern Polytechnical University (QMES) in China, a Sino-foreign Joint Educational Institute, visited Queen Mary from Monday 16 to Friday 27 July for staff development in teaching and learning. The visit was part of the activities of the new International Centre for ... [more]

July 2018

Mechanical regulation of primary cilia in tendon cells suggests a novel feedback mechanism controlling tendon health and mechanosensitivity.

New research from Prof Martin Knight and Prof Hazel Screen's group at Queen Mary University of London reveals a novel feedback mechanism regulating tendon health and homeostasis during mechanical loading. The study published in Scientific Reports investigates primary cilia in tendon cells subject to physiological and pathological mechanical loading. Primary ... [more]

Queen Mary students gear up for racing car event

Students from Queen Mary University of London will be competing at Silverstone this week in the 2018 Formula Student, Europe's most established educational engineering competition. Formula Student challenges universities from across the world to design, build and race a single-seater racing car in one year. The cars are then judged on ... [more]

Queen Mary project to reduce aircraft noise awarded funding

A new project led by engineers at Queen Mary University of London that aims to reduce aircraft noise has won significant funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The £422,275 EPSRC grant will fund the Jet Installation Noise Abatement (JINA) project, which will bring together expertise in experimental ... [more]

June 2018

Queen Mary opens international teaching and learning centre in China

Queen Mary University of London has opened an International Centre for Teaching and Learning (ICTL) with one of China’s top universities, Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU).   The Centre, which launched on 25 June, will form part of the Queen Mary University of London Engineering School of NPU (QMES), a Sino-foreign Joint ... [more]

Queen Mary students compete in prestigious drone competition

Students from Queen Mary University of London’s Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) society have competed in the UAS Challenge 2018 - a leading annual student competition in the aerospace sector. The UAS Challenge, run by Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), was held last week at the Snowdonia Aerospace Centre, near Llanbedr ... [more]

Richard Windslow passes his PhD

Dr Richard Windslow has successfully defended his PhD thesis on "Computational Modelling of Fracture Processes in Elastomeric Seals." This project was sponsored by Schlumberger, the worlds largest oilfield services company. They have a significant interest in predicting the lifetime of a very diverse range of elastomer components. Richard was supervised ... [more]

New Creative Hub Opens with Workshop Course

Our new creative hub is now operational and has just hosted the first of four workshop courses. The new creative hub is a student maker space specifically designed containing all the facilities one might need to prototype and build amazing projects. The maker space features: bench areas, machine tools, craft ... [more]

QMUL team at EuroEAP

Three current students (Hugh, Leihao and Michele) and two former students (Gabriele and Luigi) from QMUL met up at EuroEAP 2018 with Prof Federico Carpi (now at the University of Florence) and Prof James Busfield in Lyon. Luigi won the best presentation award this year which followed on from Michele winning ... [more]

Scientists develop material that could regenerate dental enamel

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have developed a new way to grow mineralised materials which could regenerate hard tissues such as dental enamel and bone. Enamel, located on the outer part of our teeth, is the hardest tissue in the body and enables our teeth to function for ... [more]

May 2018

Queen Mary awarded funding to build instrument which will revolutionise monitoring of cellular processes

Queen Mary University of London has been awarded funding to lead a joint project to build an instrument which will revolutionise the monitoring of cellular processes in tissues that line organs. The grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has a total value of £823,329 over three years, ... [more]

Dr Folashade Akinmolayan awarded Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy

Congratulations to Dr Folashade Akinmolayan who has been recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. A Senior Fellowship is awarded to those who can demonstrate a sustained record of success in relation to effective leadership, organisation and management of aspects of teaching and learning. Folashade was especially ... [more]

SEMS Academic (and Inventor) Adam Sutcliffe featured on Channel 4's "Buy It Now"

SEMS Academic (and Inventor) Adam Sutcliffe was featured on Wednesday's episode of Buy It Now on Channel 4. The programme gives an opportunity to entrepreneurs, inventors and licence holders who have a product to sell, to pitch their product to a captive audience of potential customers and a panel of professional ... [more]

Scientists discover how a pinch of salt can improve battery performance

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London, University of Cambridge and Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research have discovered how a pinch of salt can be used to drastically improve the performance of batteries. They found that adding salt to the inside of a supermolecular sponge and then baking ... [more]

Queen Mary chemist wins prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry Prize

Professor Magdalena Titirici, who works at Queen Mary University of London, is the Royal Society of Chemistry Corday-Morgan Prize winner for 2018. Professor Titirici’s research group mimics the natural process of carbon formation in the lab – a process that takes millions of years in Nature. The resulting carbon is then ... [more]

Queen Mary student team to build robotic wheelchair for Cybathlon 2020

A team of science and engineering students from Queen Mary University of London will design a robotic wheelchair with a plan to compete in Cybathlon 2020 - a global competition for people with disabilities. The team, which consists of students from the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the ... [more]

April 2018

Dr Andy Bushby wins Innovation of the Year Award

Dr Andy Bushby, from the School of Engineering and Materials Science, was presented with the 2018 Innovation of the Year Award for his project 'Weight-saving metal components achieved by length-scale engineering' at the QMUL Engagement and Enterprise Awards. He has developed a simple manufacturing process for complex 3D shaped metal engineering ... [more]

Technology network awarded funding to capture musculoskeletal degeneration

Queen Mary University of London - as part of a group of universities, hospitals and research centres - has been awarded funding to create a network seeking to develop new, high energy imaging methods to capture the dynamic biochemical and biophysical processes in biological samples. The human body is highly ... [more]

Dr Guang Li wave energy converter control project wins funding from Wave Energy Scotland

Dr Guang Li’s wave energy converter control project proposal has been selected by Wave Energy Scotland as one of 3 projects that will receive funding to be developed further. The 3 successful projects were elected among 13 projects. The project aims to develop reliable and efficient control strategies to improve the wave ... [more]

Queen Mary Awarded Funding to Establish Organ-on-a-Chip UK Network

Queen Mary University of London has been awarded funding to lead a UK network in the development of ‘Organ-on-a-chip’ devices. The network will be part of a major new Research Councils UK (RCUK) funding venture, Technology Touching Life [1], which aims to foster interdisciplinary research into innovative technology in the health ... [more]

Dan Rowson passes his PhD on the effect of mechanical loading on tendon cells

Congratulations to Dan Rowson who passed his PhD viva. Dan's PhD thesis investigated the effect of mechanical stimulation on tendon cells in order to better understand the process of tendon injury. In particular, Dan investigated the effect of mechanical forces on tiny hair-like cellular structures structures, known as primary cilia. ... [more]

New Dunhill Medical Trust grant awarded to Prof Hazel Screen to investigate the development of tendon injury with ageing.

Professor Hazel Screen has been awarded a Dunhill Medical Trust grant of £190,000, to investigate the causes of age-related tendon injury. Tendon injuries are extremely painful and highly debilitating, and become increasingly common as we age, where they can dramatically affect quality-of-life. Developing treatments is of the utmost importance, but scientists ... [more]

Storytelling project for engineers and young east Londoners wins funding

A Queen Mary University of London project which aims to give engineers the skills to create digital stories about how their work can improve the world has received funding from the Ingenious Awards. ‘Engineer the Story’ will bring together engineers to work alongside disadvantaged young people from east London who ... [more]

New animation from the British Heart Foundation shows how SEMS research into tiny tech is helping to treat heart failure

Heart failure affects an estimated 920,000 people in the UK. It means that your heart can't pump blood as well as it should do. One of the most common causes of heart failure is a heart attack. After a heart attack the damaged heart muscle can become stiff. This means your ... [more]

March 2018

Queen Mary researcher helps develop rollercoaster which charges your phone

A researcher from Queen Mary University of London has used his expertise in energy harvesting applications to help develop a rollercoaster which charges your phone. Dr Joe Briscoe, from the School of Engineering and Materials Science, was approached by Thorpe Park Resort to work on their latest ride ‘The Walking ... [more]

Advanced Newton Fellowship grant awarded to Professor Magda Titirici

Professor Magda Titirici has been successful in her application for an Advanced Newton Fellowship grant to support collaborations with Prof. Xinchen Wang’s group at the College of Chemistry, Fuzhou University on “Carbon Dots for Photocatalysis”. The grant is worth £130,000 and is the third successful Advanced Newton Fellowship for Magda’... [more]

Best poster award at UK Energy Storage Conference for Servann Herou

PhD student Servann Herou, was one of the three winners of the poster prize at the UK Energy Storage Conference held in Newcastle. Servann is part of Magda Titirici’s group and won for his work on Lignin Derived Carbon Fibers for Flexible Supercapacitors. [more]

Institute of Mechanical Engineers confirms accreditation of SEMS programmes

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) has confirmed the accreditation details for our programmes following their re-accreditation visit to SEMS in November. Students completing an IMechE accredited degree are deemed to have met part or all of the academic requirements for registration as a Chartered or Incorporated Engineer and are ... [more]

Exciting New Paper on the Tumour Microenvironment

A new paper published in the journal Cancer Discovery, by Prof Martin Knight and colleagues describes, for the first time, an evolving human metastatic microenvironment. The work led by Prof Fran Balkwill measures gene expression, matrisome proteomics, cytokine and chemokine levels, cellularity, extracellular matrix organization, and relates this to changes ... [more]

Best 3rd Year Project Student Awards Awarded at the Spring Industrial Liaison Forum

At the Spring Industrial Liaison Forum (ILF) every 3rd year project student was invited to submit a poster on their research. The best 50 posters were displayed to the visitors and the students competed for the best 3rd Year Project Prize. The judges deliberated at length and decided to split the ... [more]

Best MSc Student Project Poster

At the Spring Industrial Liaison Forum (ILF) all the MSc students were invited to submit a poster on their research topics. The best posters were invited to compete for the DePuy Synthes' MSc student Prize. The standard was once again very high this year but after careful deliberations the award ... [more]

Marie Curie Fellowship Award for Dr Luming Zhao

Congratulations to Dr Luming Zhao, who has been awarded a two-year H2020 Marie Curie Fellowship (€200k), supervised by Dr Lei Su, Prof Martin Knight and Dr Manoj Ramachandran. He will develop novel compact optical fibre lasers for clinical imaging and laser surgery. [more]

Best MEng Group in SEMS Award

At the Spring Industrial Liaison Forum (ILF) event all the 4th year MEng group project students in SEMS had the opportunity to present their projects and compete for the DePuy Synthes Group Project Prize. The standard was once again very high this year but after careful deliberations the award for ... [more]

SEMS Industrial Liaison Forum is a Great Success

The Spring SEMS Industrial Liaison Forum was a very popular event again this year. In the morning the annual taught student showcase took place in the Octagon which was followed in the afternoon by a wide range of alumni lead panel and networking sessions. There was also an Industrial Advisory ... [more]

February 2018

SEMS PhD student wins London heat of IOM Young Person’s Lecture Competition 2018

Sabina Nicolae, a SEMS PhD student supervised by Magda Titirici and Ana Jorge Sobrido, has won the London heat of the IOM Young Person’s Lecture Competition (YPLC) 2018. The YPLC invites students and professionals up to the age of 28 to deliver a short lecture on a materials, minerals, mining, packaging, ... [more]

Professor Gleb Sukhorukov reaches an h-index of 95

Congratulations to Professor Gleb Sukhorukov whose h-index has recently reached 95, as per Google Scholar. The h-index is a numerical indicator of how productive and influential a researcher is. Gleb is author and co-author of more than 300 papers whose impact is reflected in more than 30 000 citations of his works. He pioneered ... [more]

Materials expert joins Queen Mary University of London

Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, CBE, FREng, FRS, the renowned British physicist and materials expert, is set to join Queen Mary University of London as Professor of Materials Science. Working in the School of Engineering and Materials Science from 1 March 2018, he will be responsible for raising the profile of Materials Science ... [more]

Cells ‘walk’ on liquids a bit like geckos

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have discovered that cells can ‘walk’ on liquids a bit like the way geckos stick to other surfaces. Cells are typically grown on solid materials, such as tissue culture plastic, degradable polymers and bioceramics. It is thought that the strong mechanical properties of ... [more]

New printing technique uses cells and molecules to recreate biological structures

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have developed a printing technique using cells and molecules normally found in natural tissues to create constructs that resemble biological structures. These structures are embedded in an ink which is similar to their native environment and opens the possibility to make them behave ... [more]

Record Numbers of Alumni Signup for our next Industrial Liaison Forum

QMUL alumni from any Engineering, Materials or Design discipline are welcome back to the next Industrial Liaison Forum (ILF) on Wednesday, 7th March 2018. At this early stage we have more registrations than ever before with alumni coming back from a very diverse range of career paths. The ILF provides an ... [more]

Queen Mary and UAL receive grant to co-develop new curriculum model for games design

Queen Mary University of London, in partnership with London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts London (UAL), has been granted £158,354 from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to develop a games design curriculum.  The Games Fusion Project will combine the strengths of Queen Mary ... [more]

Students teach robots football tricks in annual hack

Teams of students from Queen Mary University of London and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) took part in a challenge to hack robots and teach them a range of football skills. The third Queen Mary-BUPT Design and Build Hack Week, which aims to unite students from both universities, ... [more]

New grant on mechanobiology of bone tumours

Dr Stefaan Verbruggen has recently joined the bioengineering group at Queen Mary on a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship. Stefaan is working in Prof Martin Knight's research group investigating the role of mechanical forces in bone cancer and the involvement of primary cilia. Stefaan's project is entitled 'META-DORM: Mechanobiology of ... [more]

January 2018

Cells in the heart sense stiffness by measuring contraction forces and resting tension simultaneously

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have identified a new mechanism in which adhesive structures within the cells of the heart sense stiffness through muscle contractions and resting tension at the same time. The study, published in Developmental Cell, further shows that the resting tension in the heart cells ... [more]

PhD success for Xuan Li!

Many congratulations to SEMS student Xuan Li! Xuan has successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled, “Design and development of hybrid energy harvesters”. Xuan was supervised by Dr Joe Briscoe and Prof Steve Dunn. [more]