Monthly Archives: June 2026

Professor Ning Yan Delivered CJCE ACE Award Lecture at CSChE 2026

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Congratulations to Professor Ning Yan, who delivered an Award Lecture at the Canadian Societies for Chemistry and Chemical Engineering 2026 Conferences and Exhibition, held in Toronto from May 24 to 28, 2026.

Her lecture, titled “Renewable Macromolecules for a Sustainable Future,” was presented in the Celebrating Talent in Polymer Science and Engineering session. The talk was also recognized as a CJCE Advances in Chemical Engineering (ACE) Talk, a distinction that honours presentations of exceptional quality, significance, and broad interest to the chemical engineering community. The CJCE ACE Talks are selected by Dr. João B. P. Soares, Editor-in-Chief of The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering.

Professor Yan’s talk showcased her group’s research on engineering renewable macromolecules into high-performance, sustainable materials. Using biomass-derived building blocks such as cellulose, lignin, starch, and chitosan, her team developed bio-based resins, adhesives, polyols, foams, and composites for applications in automotive materials, construction, packaging, energy storage, and flexible electronics.

The lecture also highlighted the team’s advances in bio-based Covalent Adaptable Network materials, including self-healing, recyclable, and reprocessable vitrimers that promote closed-loop recycling, improved material circularity, extended service lifetimes, and reduced waste generation.

We sincerely thank Professor Yan for delivering this inspiring lecture and sharing her insights on the future of sustainable bio-based materials!

NEW ARTICLE: Digitizing the Filtration Interface: A Smart, Modular Janus Wood Platform for Self-Reporting Oil/Water Remediation

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A new article from Ning Yan’s lab has been published in the Advanced Functional Materials written by Kaiwen Chen, Cheng Hao, Wenjuan Zhao, Haonan Zhang, Jianxiong Lyu and Ning Yan.

You can find the article here.

Abstract
Efficient and intelligent membranes that can overcome the inherent trade-off between flux and selectivity while providing real-time process monitoring are highly desirable for advanced oil/water separation. This work reported a smart conductive Janus wood membrane (CJW) that integrated high-efficiency oil/water separation with in situ real-time monitoring. A bio-inspired modular design strategy fully exploited wood’s natural anisotropy: transverse wood with vertically aligned macrochannels acted as a high-flux transport layer, while longitudinal wood with an inherent micro/nano-capillary network served as a high-precision sieving layer. Asymmetric wettability was established by grafting hydrophilic poly(DMAEMA) on one side and immobilizing hydrophobic fluorosilane-modified nano-SiO2 on the other side. A continuous GO/PPy conductive network distributed throughout the hierarchical pores enabled in situ electrical sensing during separation. The resulting membrane achieved separation efficiencies > 93.1% over 30 cycles for immiscible oil/water mixtures, with a maximum flux of 8001 L/m2·h. For oil/water emulsions, efficiencies remained > 92.3% after 10 cycles with sustained fluxes of 540-760 L/m2·h. The electrical response of the conductive network provided real-time feedback on membrane status. Additionally, a threshold-based early-warning mechanism using the coefficient of variation (CV) of resistance predicted degradation 3-18 cycles in advance. This work presents a novel paradigm for intelligent separation materials with self-monitoring capabilities.