Awards Book

SCI Members' News

Rideal Travel Bursar reports on New York Conference

With SCI's help I attended the 79th ACS Colloid and Surface Science Symposium hosted by Clarkson University and the centre for Advanced Materials Processing, Potsdam, New York, USA from 12-15 June 2005.

At the conference I presented a 20 minute talk entitled 'Controlling porosity within colloidal heteroaggregates' which was attended by approximately 40 people. It was a good opportunity to present my work to an international audience, and it revealed the strengths and weaknesses in my research when I compared it to the other 46 technical presentations I attended. In particular, I found my strengths lay in the experimental technique and applied nature of my work. Conversely, I became more aware that I need to develop my theoretical modelling skills. To this end, I saw some impressive work on computational modelling (R. Haghooie, MIT) which was highly relevant to my endeavours.

Other highlights of the conference included talks by Sir John Thomas on catalysis, H. Brenner on Brownian Motion, J. A. Fagan on Faradaic reactions and Antireflective coatings by O. D. Velev. It was my great pleasure to meet O. D. Velev in person as I have been extremely impressed by his creative work.

I also met a professor from Geneva who offered me a job! I politely declined for various reasons, but I was most flattered by the offer, and hope that there will be an opportunity in the future to collaborate. I was pleased to meet him and would not have done so, if I had not attended the conference.

From a personal perspective, it was very educational to visit the USA, a country I had never been to before. The countryside around Potsdam is picturesque and it was good to see the impressive facilities of Clarkson University. I also very much appreciated the opportunity to visit friends living close to Potsdam after the conference. Again, this opportunity was only available due to my attendance at the conference.

Dr David Snoswell
University of Bristol