The winners of the IOM3 Competitive Student Prizes for 2009 were presented in November 2009. These prizes are given to graduates who demonstrate exceptional performance on materials courses.

The Royal Charter Prize for a materials student of any discipline went to Grace Smalley of Loughborough University. She studied a MEng in Materials Engineering at Loughborough University. Her fourth year project investigated gas turbines valves and was undertaken for RWE nPower, who highly commended the work.

Grace recently started a PhD in prosthetics at the Ergonomics and Safety Research Institute at Loughborough, and by combining her materials knowledge with her love of research she hopes to improve the prostheses used by the NHS.

Lovoni Rahman won the A T Green Award as the best ceramics student. She received a 1st Class BEng degree in dental materials from Queen Mary, University of London. She has consistently been in the top three students in her degree programme.

Part of her course involved investigating the effects of adding nano-fluoroapatite powders to dental glass ionomer cements. The physical properties and solubility in different solutions were investigated.

For excellence in polymer materials, the R H Craven Award was given to Nanayaa Hughes-Brittain, the top student in her year on the MEng in Materials Engineering in Medicine course at Queen Mary, University of London.

In her final two years she specialised in polymers, focusing on biomimetic polymers. This project has been written up, and with her supervisors as coauthors, has  been accepted for publication. Off the back of this, she has received funding for the next three years. Nanayaa now hopes to complete a PhD in polymer composites.

Past Competitive Prize winners

The 2009 Materials Literature Review Prize was awarded to PhD student Samantha Bennett  from the University of Cambridge, UK, for her paper ‘Dislocations and their reduction in GaN [gallium nitride]’. Samantha’s research supports Cambridge’s efforts to produce high quality, low defect density GaN.

Prizes of £100 were made to commended entries from Imran Bhamji, for his paper ‘Solid state joining of metals by linear friction welding’, and Hossain Rashed for his review ‘Superplasticity in magnesium alloys’. Both are PhD students at The University of Manchester, UK.