The latest International Rubber Conference 2023 has recently completed in China. Five of James Busfield's Soft Matter Group presented their work. At the closing ceremony two of the group were amongst the five students awarded prizes for their presentations. The winners were William Kyei-Manu and Evangelos Koliolios who won awards for their work on filler reinforcement of rubber and the abrasion of rubber respectively.

William’s talk was coauthored with James and Keizo Akutagawa and his sponsors, Birla Carbon in the USA. Evangelos’ talk was coauthored by James and his sponsors, Sumitomo Rubber Industries in Japan.

Prof James Busfield commented that, "I am thrilled that the excellent work of Evangelos and William were both recognised at this conference and it is a great reflection of the team we have in SEMS working on soft materials. This was the fourth consecutive IRC in which at least one of our team has picked up a best student presentation award, as Leihao Chen (2019), Anureet Kaur (2021), Kirsty Rutherford and Aaron Duncan (both 2022) have previously won these awards. There is now added pressure on the students in the group that will go to Turkey to present at IRC2024 to maintain this winning run.”

Updated by: James Busfield