Rubber Division honours leading materials science & technology experts

Akron, Ohio – US rubber organisation ACS Rubber Division has named the winners of its six other Science & Technology awards during the ongoing virtual International Elastomer Conference (IEC).

The winners will receive their honours during a banquet next fall at the Rubber Division's 2021 International Elastomer Conference in Pittsburgh. The honourees include:

Melvin Mooney Distinguished Technology Award: Howard Colvin, who worked at Goodyear and Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. in his career, made significant contributions to both the development of new rubber chemicals and polymers during his four decades in the rubber industry. 

George Stafford Whitby Award for Distinguished Teaching & Research: James Busfield is professor of materials and head of the Soft Matter Research Group at Queen Mary University of London. He has been head of the Soft Matter Group since 1994, which is the largest rubber materials research group in the UK, with 14 doctorate students, two post-doctoral research assistants and five senior academics. 

Busfield's group has investigated the strength and fatigue life of elastomer components; the friction and abrasion of elastomers; and the behaviour of elastomers and reinforcing of carbon blacks, clays and silica filler in elastomers, among a number of other areas of study. He received a National Teaching Fellowship in 2009, and was awarded the Sparks-Thomas Award by the Rubber Division in 2010.

Sparks-Thomas Award for Younger Scientists: Kevin Cavicchi, associate professor of polymer engineering at the University of Akron, has made significant contributions to rubber science, having researched organogels, shape memory elastomers, ionomers and block copolymers. At UA, he developed a creative programme of polymer synthesis suing RAFT polymerisation, and has contributed to a number of RAFT agents. 

Chemistry of Thermoplastic Elastomers Award: For more than four decades, Takashi Inoue has been involved in thermoplastic elastomers and polymer blends research, which has led to many commercial blends and polymers. Currently an emeritus professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and a research professor at Yamagata University, Inoue holds 50 patents. 

He has published 270 original papers, 60 review articles and 50 books, covering areas including structure properties of polymer blends and crystalline polymers, block copolymers, sol-gel transition of polymer solutions, oil-resistant elastomer and polymer recycling.

Fernley H. Banbury Award: James Stevenson has spent more than 40 years in the rubber industry, retiring from Honeywell Aerospace as a senior scientist in 2011, where he focused on turbine blade containment, jet engine noise reduction, composite enclosures for electronic and medical devices, and polymer and metal/ceramic powder processing. 

During his career he has made a number of contributions to rubber extrusion technology, and has worked with all technical aspects of extrusion operations: die design, feeding and takeaway operations, as well as instrumentation and process control methods. Stevenson, now president of his own consulting company, has taught about 50 extrusion short courses during the last three decades.

Bioelastomer Award: Buddy Ratner, a professor at the University of Washington and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, also is the director of University of Washington Engineered Biomaterials and co-director of the Center for Dialysis Innovation. 

He has published more than 340 papers in refereed journals, with 40 of those focusing specifically on the area of bioelastomers. He holds 26 US patents.