It was a very special International Women in Engineering Day (23 June) this year! Indeed, two of our CNIE and NICE Group PhD students, Adriana BernardesandLucy Todd, defended their PhD thesis that day, and (of course?) their external examiners were two fabulous female academics, respectively Dr Emma Emanuelsson - Patterson (University of Bath) and Dr Maria Papathanasiou (Imperial College London).
You might think this date was chosen on purpose - well, it just happened to be: It is just how we work at the UCL Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering (CNIE) and the Department of Chemical Engineering, with diverse talent shining every day.
The future Dr Todd defended her thesis on “3D Nature-Inspired Scaffolds to Improve Cancer Immunotherapy and Model Biological Environments”, and the future Dr Bernardes her thesis on “Nature-Inspired Hydrodynamic Techniques to Enhance Membrane Separation Performance”. As expected, they did a wonderful job, skilfully responding to many difficult questions, proving themselves worthy of the PhD title.
Also many thanks to the Internal Examiners, Prof Kai Luo (UCL Mech Eng) and Prof Federico Galvanin (UCL Chem Eng) for their pointed questions to Adriana and Lucy, respectively.
Congratulations, Ladies, just the perfect way to celebrate International Women in Engineering Day and the talents of women engineers!
Our group had a chance to celebrate their successful PhD defences, and many the achievements of the entire group these last few months over dinner later in the week.
