Prof Marc-Olivier Coppens and Lucy Todd present at AIChE Annual Meeting.

The NICE Group was represented at their first in-person presentations at the AIChE Annual Meeting since 2019 (online during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021), after a yearly presence at this quintessential event since 1998. The conference was held in Phoenix, Arizona, and ran from 13-18 November 2022. It was fantastic to see old friends back, make new acquaintances and feel the “buzz” around the newest advances in chemical engineering, under the umbrella of “Powering the Future”.

Marc-Olivier Coppens and Lucy Todd presented the following work (see also the pictures below):

• Professor Marc-Olivier Coppens presented a lecture on “Gold nanoclusters on polymer brushes as stable antimicrobial surface”, on behalf of Dr Nidhi Kapil and Dr Halan Mohamed, who were unable to attend, in collaboration with Dr Shanom Ali (UCL H);
• Ms Lucy Todd, 2^nd year PhD student with Professor Coppens and Dr Matthew Chin , presented her work on “Nature-inspired 3D scaffolds to improve ex vivo T-cell culturing environments for adoptive cell transfer cancer immunotherapy”;
• A poster on Dr Nidhi Kapil’s PhD research, titled “Gold Nanoparticles with Tailored Size and Their Application as Unusually Stable and Efficient Propylene Epoxidation Catalyst” was presented at the AIChE CRE Division by Marc-Olivier, who met in front of the poster with Dr Michael Nigra (now Assistant Professor at the University of Utah), who co-advised Nidhi on her PhD project. Collaborators on this work were Fabio Cardinale, Dr Tobias Weissenberger and Dr Panos Trogadas (CNIE) and Xander Nijhuis (SABIC R&D, who also sponsored the work).

On the way to Phoenix, Marc-Olivier also enjoyed a visit to the pilot- and demo-scale fluidized bed facilities of our collaborators at PSRI in Chicago (Dr Ray Cocco, President and CEO, and member of the CNIE’s Advisory Board; Prof Jia-Wei Chew, Technical Director).