2025 News & Events
Conferences, awards, and group outings from 2025, newest first. This year's posts are on the main News page.
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2025
Moni Received a TPO Global Automotive Conference Scholarship 🚗
Nov. 18th, 2025
Moni received one of this year's awards from the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) for his research work on rigid or flexible polyolefins (TPOs), and specifically in his case, his work with HDPE and PP aerogels. This scholarship which ranges from $2k to $6k is intended to help cover travel expenses to the 2026 SPE Automotive TPO Global Conference. That's a lot of bucks! Maybe he can use the extra to treat his coworkers? 🙏
Peyton Received the Householder Award 🥇
May 5th, 2025
Peyton completed his first year in grad school, and with that, his first and last year of TA-ship. He was recognized as one of the top TAs based on student and faculty feedback in the Physics Department. This is likely the last year the department will give out the awards since the polymer faculty will take over teaching Physics I/II after the dissolution of the department from retrenchment.
Dr. Jana Finishes His Two-Year Role as President of PPS 🤝
Apr. 21-25th, 2025
Dr. Jana traveled to Auckland, New Zealand for the 40th International Conference of the Polymer Processing Society (PPS). He handed off the torch of the president's position and awards to many distinguished researchers.
AFS FILTCON25 🚢
Apr. 1-3, 2025
The group pictured from left to right (Abdul, Brandon, Moni, Amani, and Dr. Jana) attended the American Filtration Society's spring meeting in Louisville, KY.
Moni won a whopping $3,000 for best student poster presenter, in addition to giving his oral talk. Abdul, Brandon, and Amani also presented their posters, altogether among 16 posters.
Students came home with many goodies, and of course, new knowledge from their conversations that they are eager to apply to their research.
WaterPitch! in Washington D.C. 💧
Feb. 18-20th, 2025
Moni and Brandon joined several other water startups in Washington D.C. to pitch GelPure. The event was hosted by DC Water and run by Dr. Cat Shrier of the nonprofit WaterCitizen. In addition to the pitches and reverse pitches, staff from the EPA and US Patent Office stopped by to make short introductions of some of the resources available. We also got the chance to visit some of the halls of our House of Representatives.
VentureWell Pioneer
Jan. 9-10th, 2025
Moni and Brandon attended a two-day entrepreneurial workshop at The City Garage in Baltimore, a recently renovated space to house, share resources, and support startups particularly in the biomedical space. They covered, and reviewed, key customer discovery elements such as brainstorming potential applications and markets, mapping out value chains, making value propositions, and conducting competitive analysis. Said workshop provides that sweet non-dilutive funding, and they plan to apply and continue in the second phase of the program: Propel.
They also ran across some interesting breweries. The first one was a former church (how sacrilegious, right?), and the second one was housed in a rather large mostly glass building, which had this large distillation column. Sure wish my unit operations class in undergrad would have used one like this!
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