The latest International Rubber Conference 2022 recently completed in India. Five of James Busfield's Soft Matter Group presented their work there. At the closing ceremony one of the group, Kirsty Rutherford, took home the IRCO Best Student Presentation Award for her paper on "The development of a robust method to characterise bound rubber content of nitrile butadiene rubber."

Kirsty is in the second year of her PhD and her project is co-supervised by Dr Dimitrios Papageorgiou & Prof Keizo Akutagawa. Her project is an EPSRC Industrial Case co-sponsored by SLB with Dr Julien Ramier as the industrial sponsor. In addition, Aaron Duncan another member of James' team picked up the second prize, so it was a QMUL clean sweep this year.

Prof James Busfield commented that, "I am thrilled that the excellent work of Kirsty was recognised at this conference and for Aaron to also get second prize is a great reflection of the team we have in SEMS working on soft materials. This was the third consecutive IRC in which one of our team has picked up this IRCO best student prize, as Dr Leihao Chen and Dr Anureet Kaur have won the same award at IRC2019 in London and IRC2021 in Germany respectively. There is now added pressure on the students in the group that will go to China to present at IRC2023 to maintain this winning sequence.”

Updated by: James Busfield