Awards Book

7th World Congress of Chemical Engineering, Glasgow, Scotland

The 7th World Congress of Chemical Engineering was recently held in Glasgow, Scotland. The conference included over 700 oral presentations, and delegates from over 60 countries, and so it was truly an opportunity to learn about research in all aspects of chemical engineering being performed throughout the world.

My current interests lie in the area of downstream bioprocessing, so I was mainly interested in the conference's 'Engineering for Life' theme. The wide range of topics was particularly useful, with many interesting presentations and discussions in areas outside the scope of material that I read for my current research project.

I attended talks and posters in Biochemical Engineering, Tissue Engineering, Drug Delivery, and Biomaterials. Although the latter were the most pertinent to my work, I found the drug delivery talks to be particularly interesting. In particular, a couple of talks about targeting tumour cells with fluorescent nanoparticles and responsive polymers were intriguing. I may be able to incorporate aspects of these presentations in my protein work.

The most useful aspect of the conference for me was being able to present my work in an oral presentation. The talk that I gave was titled 'Metal Affinity Chromatography for the Single Step Purification and Refolding of a Recombinant Protein'. This was an excellent opportunity to raise other researchers' awareness of the work being done at the University of Cambridge, and also to get feedback and ideas for additional projects. I had an encouraging response from numerous people in the audience, and I think that it was clear that many agreed there is scope to utilise expanded bed adsorption columns for protein purification and refolding operations.

In addition to attending talks in the 'Engineering for Life' theme, I also had the opportunity to attend talks and keynotes in areas unrelated to my current research. As these ranged from the space station, to metabolic engineering, to supercooled liquids, it was clear that the field of Chemical Engineering is expanding into many fields that I had considered unrelated. This exposure to such a wide range of topics is at the very least an enriching and enlightening experience, and might even stimulate new ideas for my future work.

In addition to all of the scientific benefits, I also benefited personally from being able to attend this conference. As I come to the end of my degree I am increasingly looking for new and interesting places to work, as well as people I would like to work with. Attending this conference gave me a forum to meet people who work both in academia and industry, which I hope will be useful when searching for a position after I graduate. In addition, I found Glasgow and Scotland to be rich with culture and history, and I was glad to be able to spend some time there.

I can definitely conclude that attending the 7th World Congress of Chemical Engineering was very beneficial for me, and I am grateful for the Messel Bursary from SCI for helping me to attend this conference.

Matt Hutchinson
Department of Chemical Engineering
University of Cambridge