Blog posts

IMSE people – Lingfeng Griffin Gui, MRes alumnus

Over 2022, we’re catching up with some of the people who came to study at IMSE on the  Molecular Science and Engineering MRes. They are now going on to a wide variety of exiting jobs in the world. The IMSE MRes has been running since 2017, so there are more than 30 MRes alumni! This week, we speak to Griffin Gui, who studied at IMSE in 2018-2019.

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Academic-industry partnerships: risk, money, ideas and skills

One of the fun things I have to do in my job is find ways to increase collaborative research between IMSE and commercial companies. This is complicated. Research is risky, it’s expensive, it’s built on constantly generating new ideas, and this only happens with the right mix of the right people. How can we make all of this happen? One of the ways is with big collaborative research projects which are part-funded by industry and partly by public investment. In this post, I look at how this works.

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Conservation of materials in a changing world

How can we prevent damage to old objects when the environment around them is changing? Imperial College London and the Victoria and Albert Museum are collaborating to solve new questions in the conservation of materials.

On 7 September, the Science and Engineering Research for Cultural Heritage network organised a collaborative workshop with the conservation team at the V&A. The goal was to brainstorm areas where Imperial scientists and engineers could collaborate with museum conservators and scientists, in order to solve problems in conserving cultural heritage objects.

A handheld XRF analyser is pointed at a shallow cream and blue bowl.
Roman glass being analysed by a handheld XRF analyser. XRF identifies elemental composition, which is essential for conservation of materials. ©V&A

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IMSE people – Javiera Pérez, MRes alumna

Over the summer of 2022, we’re catching up with some of the people who came to study at IMSE on the Molecular Science and Engineering MRes. They are now going on to a wide variety of exiting jobs in the world. The IMSE masters course in molecular engineering has been running since 2017, so there are more than 30 MRes alumni. This week, we speak to Javiera Perez, who studied at IMSE in 2019-2020.

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UK chemicals regulation – a rapidly evolving system

Part of my job as Translation and Research Manager is to support the production of new IMSE briefing papers. Topics vary as widely as IMSE’s research themes, which cover sustainability, innovation and health and wellbeing. One of the current papers in preparation is on chemical additives in plastics. This really combines all three themes! So I’ve been exploring how the UK currently does chemicals regulation. It’s complicated… To find out more, I attended a meeting of the UK Chemicals Stakeholder Forum last month.

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