Leeds-Lyon Symposium, PhD recruitment and plasma surface engineering soft materials
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Hello all,
Hope you're well. It's once again coming up to conference season and we're very happy to feature the Leeds-Lyon Symposium to kick off our event features. The Symposium is now in its 50th year and aims to address current challenges in tribology and new challenges in the next fifty years. More details below. I fondly remember helping set up some of the conference sessions during my PhD at the University of Leeds. It was fantastic to have a front-row seat to some of the most groundbreaking tribology research. Maybe that's where I started to enjoy hosting before joining Surface Ventures. Have a fantastic next couple of weeks.
Research highlights: Highly Cited Review
In surface engineering, it feels like soft materials are neglected in favour of the newest hard low friction coating. Plasmas can be applied to and deposit more than just hard thin films. Hegemann and Gaisier's "Plasma surface engineering for manmade soft materials: a review" highlights the importance of soft materials at the interface of synthetic and biological components. Materials such as these include gels, hydrogels, elastomers, structural materials, nanoparticles and biological materials. This review underlines the importance of plasma surface engineering to form, modify and coat soft materials.
Research Resources: Perspective on PhDs
A PhD can open up opportunities for enabling social mobility. Naturally, it's not an easy pathway but beyond the challenge of the work, it appears that there are fewer people enrolling on PhD programmes in Australia, Japan, the UK and others. There are concerns that low stipends, high living costs and limited jobs after graduation are deterring candidates from pursuing doctoral degrees. This is concerning due to the possible effects on scientific progress but more importantly, the welfare of the doctoral candidates. Read more in this article from Nature.
Interesting Infographics
Choosing a degree is complex, you should balance passion for the subject, potential for a future career and, of course, financial return. Though this graphic is based in the US, we can clearly see that STEM degrees give the largest return on investment with engineering having the highest return. You can find out more about this infographic from Voronoi here.
From our Partner
The 50th Leeds-Lyon Symposium on Tribology is focused on the tribological challenges underpinning the innovations of the next fifty years and reviews the achievements highlighted in the last fifty years of the Symposium. The symposia are jointly sponsored by the University of Leeds and the National des Sciences Appliquèes (INSA) de Lyon, Université de Lyon. The institutions alternate hosting the event which has now become a mainstay in the international tribology calendar.
The Symposium is from Tuesday 2nd September to Thursday 4th September at the University of Leeds, UK. The deadline for the 1-page abstract for oral presentation is Monday 3rd March. The themes requested for this year's Symposia are:
Email?[email protected]?for any enquiries relating to the conference.
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Notable and quotable
“In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs." – Sir William Osler
What we’re reading
The news has recently been awash with the possibility of an asteroid impacting Earth in 2032. Items like this crop up every so often in space news, I wonder if it's the enduring memories of Armageddon or Deep Impact that keep journalists coming back. I don't mean to dismiss this as nonsense, thousands of kilograms of space rock hit earth every year but most is so small that it burns up in the atmosphere. Larger objects have more destructive potential but we should keep in mind the probability of impact has decreased massively according to ESA's Near Earth Object Centre. Read more in this article in The Conversion from Maggie Lieu from the University of Nottingham.
An app a day
RSS is a fantastic web protocol that allows users to retrieve updates from websites, it's widely used for podcasts and for news and there are even feeds for scientific journals. There are a number of programs to access RSS feeds but one of my favourites is Fluent Reader. This open-source cross-platform news aggregator is privacy-focused allowing you to read what interests you without adverts. You can also backup feeds or synchronise with web providers like Inoreader.
The Lighter Side of the Internet
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Curated By Dr Samuel McMaster
Content Manager – Surface Ventures