Congratulations to Dr Shuxian Jiang!

A heartfelt congratulations to Dr Shuxian Jiang, who recently obtained her PhD title, on "Hydrodynamics and Heat Transfer in Dynamically Structured Fluidised Beds". Many thanks to Prof Rachel Smith (Sheffield) and Prof Panagiota Angeli (UCL) for the expert examination on 18 November.
I had the great pleasure to co-advise Shuxian on her MSc thesis at Zhejiang University, using our tree-inspired, fractal injector to intensify liquid-liquid mixing and reactions in a scalable way. After that, she started her PhD thesis under my guidance at UCL Chemical Engineering and the Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering (CNIE), which was a very challenging move during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-1.
Shuxian persevered and focused initially on detailed steady- and unsteady-state CFD simulations in the liquid phase, testing the opportunities of using pulsation and a fractal injector for process intensification, while learning more about mixing and about gas-solid fluidisation at the same time.
Once our labs opened again, she made remarkable progress on the central topic of her PhD: studies of pulsation-induced dynamic structuring of fluidised beds and the impact on heat transfer, for which she built new experimental setups, comparing different methods. Her fundamental research was sponsored by Synfuels China.
She showed herself to be a true Chemical Engineer and scientist, technically very sharp, a meticulous experimentalist and a computer modeller with deep theoretical insight: a rare combination.
She also collaborated with visitors from Politecnico di Milano (group of Prof Matteo Maestri) and Ghent University (Prof Yi Ouyang), in the latter case leading to a joint article, where she developed a methodology to track bubble evolution based on deep-learning methods for image analysis that are able to correct for artefacts and noise.
Dr Shuxian Jiang is a real scholar, who would never take shortcuts. Despite publishing, already, five papers as first author (IECR, CES, PowderTech, CEPPI) with a sixth one under revision, and two more as co-author (AIChE J, Adv Sci), she has a pile of additional, as yet unpublished work, because quality has to go before quantity, with other work to be further, rigorously developed.
I am very happy that she is now continuing research as a postdoc with former CNIE postdoc and now Ass Prof, Dr Victor Francia at Heriot-Watt University. Over the years, we have continued a wonderful collaboration within the NICE family, also including Dr Kaiqiao Wu, CNIE graduate and now Ass Prof in Guangdong University of Technology.
Well done, Dr Jiang!

(Author: Prof. Marc-Olivier Coppens)