Ph.D. Candidate Nicole Tratnik won first prize in the Excellence in Thermoset Polymers Research Competition hosted by the Thermoset Resin Formulators Association for her paper titled “Recyclable, self-strengthening starch-based epoxy vitrimer facilitated by exchangeable disulfide bonds”. She was flown out to Denver, CO to present her work at the TRFA Annual Meeting with over 120 attendees. Her award-winning paper can be found here.

Congratulations Nicole!

You can read more about the news on the UofT Chem Eng website here.

We are happy to announce our Ph.D Candidate, Nicole Tratnik, won 5th place in the student poster competition at the SPE,EAV Plastics in Electric & Autonomous Vehicles Conference. Her poster was titled, “Enhanced sustainability of upcycleable biobased epoxy vitrimers with designed recyclability” and was based off of her recently published paper that can be found here.
Congrats Nicole!

The article Lignin-Based Polyurethane: Recent Advances and Future Perspectives written by Xiaozhen Ma, Jing Chen, Jin Zhu, and Ning Yan was among the top cited articles in 2021 – 2022 according to data from Clarivate Analytics.

Last week, Shrestha successfully defended her PhD thesis, “Ionic Liquid Mediated Synthesis of Starch Maleates and their Application in Biodegradable Polymer Composites”. Congratulations Shrestha, your hard work paid off!

Last week, a member of Prof. Ning Yan’s lab, Lunding Fan, successfully defended his Master’s thesis “Effect of Curing Agents on the Cure Behaviour and Thermal and Mechanical Properties of a Novel Vanillin-based Bio-epoxy Resin”.

Congratulations to Lunding, your hard work really shows!

The International Academy of Wood Science is a non-profit assembly of wood scientists, recognizing all fields of wood science with their associated technological domains and securing a worldwide representation. You can read more about them at their website here.

Congratulations Professor Yan on being elected a new Fellow for 2021.

Professor Ning Yan has been awarded the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Bioproducts. Congratulations Professor Yan, it is a well-deserved position!

You can read more about it here.

Among her colleagues include 6 other researchers from UofT including the following:

• Omar F. Khan (BME) Canada Research Chair in Nucleic Acid Therapeutics
• Elizabeth Edwards (ChemE) Canada Research Chair in Anaerobic Biotechnology 
• Penney Gilbert (BME) Canada Research Chair in Endogenous Repair 
• Heather MacLean (CivMin) Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Systems and Technology Assessment
• Daniel Posen (CivMin) Canada Research Chair in System-Scale Environmental Impacts of Energy and Transport Technologies 
• Milica Radisic (BME, ChemE) Canada Research Chair in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering