The latest International Rubber Conference 2025 was hosted in Thailand from the 1-3 December 2025. At the closing ceremony Sarah Pedroni was announced as a winner of an IRCO best student presentation award for her talk on “Microstructural Modelling of Carbon Black Aggregates for Improved Tyre Design”. Sarah’s talk was coauthored with James Busfield and Keizo Akutagawa and Lewis Tunnicliffe from her sponsors, Birla Carbon in the USA.

Prof James Busfield commented that, "It is amazing that Sarah’s great work has been recognised at this conference. It is amazing that a first year PhD student can win such a prestigious international award when there were more than 50 student presentations to choose from at the event. It is a great reflection of the team we have in SEMS working on soft materials.” Sarah gave one of the seven papers presented by the Soft Matter Group this year.

Sarah is the tenth member of James’ team to win an IRCO best student award at the IRC since they were first introduced in 2016. Previous winners include Richard James Windslow (2016), Francesca Carleo (2016), Leihao Chen (2019), Eduardo Yanes (2019), Anureet Kaur (2021), Kirsty Rutherford (2022), Aaron Duncan (2022), William Kyei-Manu (2023) and Evangelos Koliolios (2023). James went to add “There is now added pressure on the students that will go to Japan to present at IRC2026 to maintain this tradition.”