At the IOM3 Awards Ceremony on the 5th December 2024, Prof James Busfield was awarded the T B Marsden Professional Medal for his substantial and long term services to the Institute, profession and organisation in the UK.

The award was in recognition that James has been actively involved with the IOM3 rubber community for 30 years. His interaction started with the Rubber in Engineering Group, now the IOM3 Elastomer Group, where he has been the chair for the last 14 years. Under his leadership the group has organised more than 100 conferences, events and discussion meetings. Historically, these events attracted 50-100 delegates in person, however since going hybrid the numbers have risen often to more than 200 (and occasionally above 500) registrations.

James has also been the chairman of many highly successful global conferences run by the IOM3 such as RubberCON 2014 in Manchester, RubberCON 2023 in Edinburgh (310 delegates) and the International Rubber Conference 2019 in London (550 delegates). Each conference was won through an international competitive tendering process led by James. He has recently secured the European Conference for Constitutive Modelling of Rubber, which will be run by the IOM3 in 2026.

James has also served on the IOM3 Polymer Group (and all recent antecedents) for more than 25 years and is also the rubber paper editor of the IOM3 journal, Plastics, Rubber and Composites: Macromolecular Engineering.