On Friday, November 23, we held our third annual ORF-RE7 meeting on Clean Manufacturing and Nanoengineering of Sustainable Materials. In attendance were our industry partners, board members, principal investigators, postdoctoral fellows, researchers and students.
The event opened with a keynote address delivered by Dr. James Dunn of Imperial Oil on the Clean Resource Innovation Network (CRIN). He was followed by Dr. Hans- Josef Endres, from Fraunhofer Institute, Germany who informed the audience about developments in the commercialization of biocomposites.
Researchers from the University of Toronto, University of Guelph, University of Windsor, University of Western Ontario and McMaster University including undergraduates, graduates students, and post-doctoral fellows put up a number of informative posters on their research topics. We’d like to thank our industry partners Dr. Douglas Maclaren (Imperial Oil), Dr. Omar Faruk(Ford), Dr. Shabnam Sanei(Domtar) and Dr. Ed Bernard(Crestmold) for judging the posters. Congratulations once again to Maryam Arefamesh (3rd Place), Zhihui Yi (2nd Place) and Alyssa Henley (1st Place) for winning poster awards!
Students and researchers also presented their research results and progress updates in a number of sessional talks , looking at “Functional Carbon”, “Lignin and Cellulose-derived Materials and Coatings”, “Lightweight Structural Bio-composites” and “Printable and Flexible Devices and Smart Materials”. Thank you to Prof. Geoffrey Ozin, Prof. Amar Mohanty, Dr. Shaffiq Jaffer, Dr. Cedric Pupin and Prof. Michael Thompson for chairing the sessions.
We’d like to thank all who participated in this successful meeting. We appreciated Dr. Dunn and Prof. Endres for kicking off the day with their insightful talks on CRIN and developments in Europe on the commercialization of biocomposites. We’d like to also thank our industry partners and principal investigators for making time in their busy schedules to attend the meeting and participating in the day long discussions. Their steadfast support is critical to the continued success of this project. And last but not least, a big thank you to all our graduate students, postdoctoctoral fellows and researchers.
We look forward to seeing you all next year for another exciting event!