MCAM Surlon India Ltd

Mcam surlon, a global leader in the manufacturing of high-performance thermoplastics and composites, conferred the coveted international "Quadrant Award" for the fifth time on Friday, January 25, 2013. The international invitation to submit entries for the award was addressed to graduates who had written a doctoral thesis in the field of "Materials and processes related to engineering and high-performance plastics and composites" between October 1, 2010, and September 30, 2012. Of the four prizewinners, the Japanese researcher Dr. Nobuhiro Yanai won the first prize of EUR 15 000. Dr. Yanai wrote his thesis at Kyoto University, Japan and is now assistant professor at Kyushu University, Japan. The other three Quadrant Award winners, who have won prizes of EUR 5 000 each are (in alphabetical order): Dr. Shelby B. Hutchens (USA), California Institute of Technology, USA, post-doctoral position at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA; Dr. Sangwoo Lee (South Korea), University of Minnesota, USA, post-doctoral position at the University of Minnesota; and Dr. Neil D. Treat (USA), University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, post-doctoral position at Imperial College London, UK. The event took place at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.

The academic jury awarded the first prize to Nobuhiro Yanai for his thesis entitled "Controlling Polymer Properties in Coordination Nanospaces" for "his development of elegant strategies utilizing metal organic frameworks to template polymeric systems and tailor their properties at the nanoscale. Formation of polymers in controlled pore geometries leads to control of many properties, such as transition temperatures in quasi-one dimensional arrays and two dimensional template geometries. Yanai tackled these problems with a creative combination of experimental and modeling approaches. Applications include tailored anisotropic conductivity, tailored ion-conductive polymers, and fluorescence switching by gas absorption. His contributions to fundamental science include a better understanding of pore size effects, and the origin of transition behavior due to guest-guest and guest-host interactions."

The three other Quadrant Award winners, who have won prizes of EUR 5 000 each are (in alphabetical order):

Shelby B. Hutchens was awarded for the thesis entitled "Deformation Behavior and Mechanical Analysis of Vertically Aligned Carbon Nanotube (VACNT) Bundles" for "developing simple models to describe the deformation of carbon nanotube assemblies under mechanical stress, by combining experiment and simulation with great synergy."

Sangwoo Lee was awarded for the thesis entitled "Structure and Dynamics of Block Copolymer Based Soft Materials" for "the discovery of sigma phases of block co-polymers, which combine features of crystallinity and glass-like behavior, and characterizing these novel phases exhaustively."