Two researchers from the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at The University of Queensland have won awards for their work during UQ’s annual Research Week.
Associate Group Leader and ARC Future Fellow Dr Zhongfan Jia from the Monteiro Group won an esteemed Foundation Research Excellence Award for his research to develop a totally plastic battery to power future flexible and wearable electronic devices.
“It’s a great honour to receive this prestigious award after working in UQ for more than six years. I am very excited and proud of it,” Dr Jia said.
“To realise both charge transport and storage properties by only using a polymer material is currently still a challenge,” he said.
“The new material developed from this research will have these key properties and therefore can be used for making a totally plastic battery.”
It is envisaged that in a fully completed product, the waste battery from this new material could simply be disposed of into a recycle bin just like an empty water bottle without any environmental concern of heavy metals.
Associate Group Leader Dr Esteban Marcellin from the Nielsen Group also won an award for his industry-partnered work into sustainable petroleum.
He won the Science Prize of the Partners in Research Excellence Award for his collaboration with The DOW Chemical Company.
“Industrial biotechnology is a way of getting cleaner chemistry,” Dr Marcellin said.
“For me it’s very important to see my research translated into something useful, and the best way to do that is obviously to have an industrial partner.”
“My project is about engineering bacteria for the production of sustainable chemicals using systems biology.”
Media: Darius Koreis, d.koreis@uq.edu.au, +61 7 3346 3962.
