Recent conferences

I was invited to provide a lecture to graduate students at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.
During the talk, I try to introduce various methods to design antifouling membranes, and to discuss some important process parameters to adjust to optimize the tradeoff between stability of the design and antifouling properties.

During the Annual Meeting of the Taiwan Polymer Society (2024中華民國高分子學會年會) held in Tainan on January 24th and 25th, I had the opportunity to present our ongoing research on the development of antifouling porous membranes using greener solvents than the ones we used to employ. Hence I presented some results obtained with dimethyl sulfoxide, triethyl phosphate, γ-Valerolactone, trying to emphasize also the effect of the solvent on the membrane structure. The presentation is available below. 

I had the opprotunity to deliver a Keynote lecture during ICOM 2023 on the formation and application of PVDF VIPS membrane in direct contact membrane distillation. The presentation also showcased the steps taken in order to optimize the membrane performances, via the formation process and formulation parameters.

During this conference, Dr Maggay presented  her work on the development of skin-free and macrovoids-free polysulfone membranes. Interestingly, the membranes that she prepared have similar permeabilities to those measured with more conventional membranes (with macrovoids) but much better mechanical properties. 

During this conference, I presented our recent studies on the development of functional membranes for killing bacteria during their permeation, degrading antibiotics during filtration, and selectively removing leukocytes from whole blood. 

During this talk at the International Symposium on Novel and Sustainable Technology, I summarized our recent studies on the applications of anti-biofouling membranes in the biomedical fields.

A work on the separation of drug enantiomers, presented at the 16th International Conference on Inorganic Membranes (ICIM16) by Dr. Irish Maggay, postdoctoral researcher in our lab (more about her here), in Taipei (Taiwan).

A summary of our recent activity on the design of leukodepletion filters, presented online at the International Conference of Innovative Application Technology, organized by the College of Engineering of CYCU.

A summary of our works on the application of anti-biofouling membranes as wound dressing materials presented at the International Membrane Science and Technology 2020, in Sydney, Australia.

During the 2019 EMN Meeting on Polymer in Hawaii (USA) we presented a series of works showcasing membranes able to break emulsions solely under the action of gravity. These membranes are all imparted with superwettability.

During iWMK 2019 in Kobe (Japan), we presented our results concerning the essential molecular design parameters essential to consider in order to optimize the performances of antifouling membranes. We shared data obtained with both PEGylated and zwitterionic copolymers.

We attended the annual conference of the North American Membrane Society in 2019, NAMS 2019, held in Pittsburg, PA (USA).  Druing the talk, we placed the emphasis on the design similarities betwen biofouling-resistant membranes and wound healing materials.