2007 E. Gordon Young Memorial Lectureship.

The E. Gordon Young Lectureship is an annual event made possible by a bequest to the Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC) by E. Gordon Young, MCIC, a distinguished chemist and former CIC president. It is administered by the CIC Chemical Education Fund. The lecture series includes two technical or

The Atlantic CIC Local Section was honoured to host the 2007 E. Gordon Young Memorial Lectures last December. Eugenia Kumacheva of the University of Toronto presented her lecture, "Microfluidics and Polymers--discovery and development," at the University of New Brunswick, at Dalhousie University, and at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Kumacheva gave an elegant overview of the progress her group has made in developing microfluidic strategies for the continuous synthesis of a variety of polymer colloids with controlled sizes, shapes, and compositions. She provided an excellent introduction to microfluidic reactors, which have a number of special features including high heat and mass transfer rates, safe and rapid synthesis, and the possibility to develop new reaction pathways that are too difficult for conventional processes. Recently, droplet-based microfluidics has opened exciting opportunities in developing new materials and fast throughput screening of physical and chemical processes. Kumacheva demonstrated the use of capsules of biopolymers as model cells to study their flow through chemically and topographically patterned microchannels.

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Kumacheva is known for her contributions in the field of complex fluids, polymer science, and materials chemistry--particularly her discoveries of phase transitions in simple liquids confined to molecularly thin layers and entropically driven lubrication in polymer brushes, and convection in phase-separating polymer liquids. She has proposed new strategies for the self-assembly in complex fluids and new concepts of materials for high-density optical data storage and security documents, and new approaches to hybrid polymer-inorganic materials. She has developed continuous microfluidic reactors for polymer synthesis. Her accomplishments have been recognized by the CSC Clara Benson Award in 2004 and the Macromolecular Science and Engineering Award from the CIC in 2005. In 2007, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Russell J. Boyd, FCIC, CSC president