September 2025. Fiona Wins 1st year PGR Poster Prize.
The Heriot-Watt University Postgraduate Research Day for the Engineering and Physical Sciences (EPS) school took place in September. The day included talks by final year PhD students, who were awarded 2nd year prizes, across EPS and posters presented by 1st year PhD students. The day highlighted the incredible research carried out by students across the school, including chemistry. The posters were judged by members of staff, with Fiona winning the 1st year poster prize for chemistry. An amazing achievement!
September 2025. Marc Presents at Royce 2025 Annual Conference
Marc attended the Royce 2025 Annual Conference to deliver a lecture in the “Consumer Products, Packaging, and Specialist Polymers” session. The session focused on emerging strategies for the design and development of sustainable consumer materials, with a particular emphasis on polymers used in packaging and other specialised applications. It showcased approaches to sustainable materials discovery, circular economy integration, and real-world impact, spanning both academic and industrial perspectives—particularly in identifying opportunities to harness robotics, high-throughput experimentation, and systems thinking to support the transition towards more sustainable, scalable solutions for consumer-facing materials.
June 2025. Fiona Presents at Perkin Meeting at Edinburgh University
In June, Fiona presented a poster at the Scottish regional meeting for organic chemistry, the Perkin meeting, at Edinburgh University. This featured interesting talks from academics at Scottish universities, ranging from small molecule organic synthesis to high-throughput automated pathways assisted by AI algorithms. Poster presentations provided a great opportunity to see what research is being carried out by other PhD students across the country, as well as enabling the chance to meet new people and spark new ideas for research.
MAL Research Group 