The Soft Matter Group at QMUL has had many successes over the seven years that we have run the Russell Binion's Symposium in SEMS. This year another of James Busfield's students, Eathan Plaschka, took home first prize in the Centre for Intelligent Transport category. His prize wining talk was on "Exploring Friction and Wear Characteristics of Tire Tread Compounds: How to Advance Safety and Sustainability During Development." Eathan's project is sponsorded by a F1 team, but he presented work that he has done on the performance of typical passenger car tyre compounds.

James was delighted to see Eathan do so well this year and commented that Eathan has a particular knack of explainnig really hard to follow concepts in a really easily digestable way. Well done to Eathan and all of the SMG team who presented this year.