Established in 2006, the McBain Medal is an annual award to honour an early career researcher or technologist who has made a meritorious contribution to colloid and interface science.
The award is intended to recognise both achievement and evidence of future promise. Eligible candidates should be in the UK in the earlier stages of their career, typically within 15 years of attaining their doctorate (or equivalent degree), and will have advanced the science or technology of the field in a significant way. It is named after James William McBain.
On Friday 30 January over fifty people gathered at the Edgbaston Park Hotel at University of Birmingham to celebrate Associate Professor Gemma-Louise Davies winning the annual McBain medal for outstanding early career research in colloid chemistry.
Gemma assembled a fantastic programme of six talks from her collaborators. The day opened with a presentation by Prof Rachel O’Reilly PVC for Research at the University of Birmingham on precision polymer nanoparticles. Rachel knew Gemma since her time at the University of Warwick, where she acted as Gemma’s mentor. Rachel was also a previous recipient of the McBain medal in 2014. This was followed by a talk by Prof Gareth Williams from UCL on developing “ Phormulations “ for phages. Gareth and Gemma have being working together since 2017. The final talk before lunch was by Prof Seb Perrier from the University of Warwick on the precision polymer chemistry to design therapeutic materials. Seb is another collaborator of Gemma’s, although they were colleagues at Warwick it was not until Gemma moved to UCL that they started to collaborate together.
After lunch and posters there were three more talks. Firstly, Prof Nguyen Thanh from UCL presented her group’s work on Nanoparticles for diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Thanh works in a very closely related area to Gemma and they were colleagues at UCL for several years, where she is currently Vice Dean for Innovation and Enterprise. Thanh was also the 2023 recipient of the Thomas Graham prize to recognise her outstanding mid career research in colloids and interfaces. Next to speak was Prof Matt Gibson, again another previous McBain medal winner (2021) from the University of Manchester who spoke about Biomaterials to mimic or target glycans for therapy and sensing. Then, finally Dr Marco Giardiello from the University of Liverpool spoke enthusiastically on tracer design for magnetic particle imaging. After a quick coffee break and a final chance to look at the posters Gemma closed the event with her McBain medal lecture on Designing MRI based therapeutic and diagnostic tools : From cancer to chemical weapons.
Dr Richard Greenwood and Dr Shirin Alexander present the McBain Medal to Dr Gemma-Louise Davies
The meeting closed with the two Chairs of the Joint Colloids Committee: Dr Richard Greenwood and Dr Shirin Alexander, formally presenting Gemma with the medal and arranging for a photo of her to be taken with the other McBain medal winners present, Rachel and Matt. Two poster prizes supported be RSC's Journal of Materials Chemistry B and Materials Advances were awarded to Alexandra Billina from University of Birmingham and Christina Puijk from UCL. The organisers would like to thank the sponsors Unilever, RSC's Journal of Materials Chemistry B, CellPress and University of Birmingham and the exhibitor (Asynt) for their kind support of the event.
