Texas A&M University at Qatar (Tamuq) and the Qatar Fertiliser Company (Qafco) co-hosted their annual day-long symposium featuring prominent chemists and chemical engineers who shared the latest advances in their fields. The 2019 Qafco – Tamuq Conference was the 11th in the series and focused on functional materials.
The conference highlighted the pressing need for government, industry and academia to work together to develop new knowledge and create scientific solutions that have direct impact on the world around us.
Qafco CAO, Dr Hamed al-Marwani described the event as a key platform in bringing together research, engineers, scientists and the business world. “The conference consistently manages to highlight trending topics in the field of chemical engineering, which opens a dialogue to bridge the gap between industry and academia. The 2019 conference was extremely intriguing, and I hope that all attendees found the discussions inspiring.”
The 2019 conference focused on functional materials, which have certain desirable properties and functions of their own, such as ferroelectricity, piezoelectricity, magnetism or energy storage functions. These materials are of critical importance in energy applications and can help Qatar as it addresses its research challenges.
The conference featured keynote speaker Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, the JC Warner University professor of natural sciences at the Carnegie Mellon University. Matyjaszewski discovered a polymerisation process that was commercialised in 2004 in the US, Japan and Europe. He has been co-author of more than 1,000 publications and holds 62 US patents. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the US National Academy of Inventors. Other speakers were from Korea, Germany and the UK.
The event also provided a forum for the exchange of ideas and opportunities for future collaborations, said Tamuq dean Dr Cesar Octavio Malave.
“Part of the mission of our branch campus is to be a valued and essential resource to Qatar,” Malave said. “We work to fulfil this mission in part by hosting conferences such as this one to encourage knowledge sharing and to build bridges with other researchers and research institutions around the world through international collaborations.”
Qafco’s Dr al-Marwani and Tamuq’s Dr Malave at the conference.
