Alice Blumlein has been awarded the 2015 Wesley Cocker Prize from the Society of Chemical Industry, All Ireland Group. Professor Cocker (1908-2007) was instrumental in establishing the Irish Section of the Society of Chemical Industry in 1947. The award named in his honour is given to the best paper or patent on a topic of relevance to industrial chemistry, where the main author is a PhD or BSc student in Ireland.
Alice won the award this year for her work on tough protein gels which led to the paper “Bigel formation via spinodal decomposition of unfolded protein”. The paper was featured on the cover of the Journal of Materials Chemistry B and has been selected as a “Hot Article” for a special web edition of J. Mat. Chem. B. which can be read here.
The research was conducted in the Soft Matter research group in the Department of Chemistry under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer McManus and was funded by a Maynooth University Teaching Fellowship to Alice Blumlein and a Science Foundation Ireland Stokes Lectureship to Jennifer McManus.
