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:
On June 18, 2021, Nicole Tratnik presented a talk on the effect of amylose and amylopectin content on epoxidation and adhesion properties at the 25th Annual ACS Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference.
This year Professor Ning Yan was selected as the recipient of the 2021 Bill Burgess Teacher of the Year Award for Small Classes by the Department’s Teaching Effectiveness Committee. This award aims to recognize the efforts and excellence in teaching within ChemEng.
The award was announced during the virtual awards celebration Friday April 9, 2021.The plaque for this award lives on the second floor of the Wallberg Building where Professor Ning Yan’s name will be added.
Artwork by Dr. Nicolas R. Tanguy was featured in ChemSusChem for the article written by Dr. Nicolas R. Tanguy, Dr. Haoran Wu, Dr. Sandeep S. Nair, Prof. Keryn Lian, and Prof. Ning Yan. Read the article here
This article was was also covered in the ChemViews Magazine.
Professor Ning Yan has been elected Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada for her contributions to engineering and service to the profession and society.
Click here for the full article in University of Toronto Engineering News
A new article out of Prof. Ning Yan’s lab in collaboration with Prof. Lian’s lab (Materials Engineering) has been published in Chemistry Europe’s ChemSusChem written by Dr. Nicolas Tanguy, Dr. Haoran Wu, Dr. Sandeep Niar, Prof. Keryn Lian and Prof. Ning Yan. This article explores using lignin cellulose nanofibrils in fabricating flexible supercapacitor electrodes for wearable electronics.The article was selected as Very Important Paper by the Editors of the journal, invited for an article in Chemistryviews.org, and for a Cover art as well. More to come!
Click here to view the article
The increasing demand for wearable electronics has driven the development of supercapacitor electrode materials toward enhanced energy density, while being mechanically strong, flexible, as well as environmentally friendly and low‐cost. Taking advantage of faradaic reaction of quinone groups in natural lignin that is covalently bound to the high‐strength cellulose nanofibrils, the fabrication of a novel class of mechanically strong and flexible thin film electrodes with high energy storage performance is reported. The electrodes were made by growing polyaniline (PANI) on flexible films composed of lignin‐containing cellulose nanofibrils (LCNF) and reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanosheets at various loading levels. The highest specific capacitance was observed for the LCNF/rGO/PANI electrode with 20 wt% rGO nanosheets (475 F g−1 at 10 mV s−1 and 733 F g−1 at 1 mV s−1), which represented a 68 % improvement as compared to a similar electrode made without lignin. In addition, the LCNF/rGO(20)/PANI electrode demonstrated high rate performance and cycle life (87 % after 5000 cycles). These results indicated that LCNF functioned as an electrochemically active multifunctional component to impart the composite electrode with mechanical strength and flexibility and enhanced overall energy storage performance. LCNF/rGO(20)/PANI electrode was further integrated in a flexible supercapacitor device, revealing the excellent promise of LCNF for fabrication of advanced flexible electrodes with reduced cost and environmental footprint and enhanced mechanical and energy storage performances.
The supplimentary cover art by Nicole Tratnik, from the article “Biobased Epoxidized Starch Wood Adhesives: Effect of Amylopectin and Amylose Content on Adhesion Properties”(10.1021/acssuschemeng.0c05716) was recently published in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.
Click here to see the article
Yan Lab 