Prof Wilson Poon awarded ECIS-Solvay Prize
This prize is granted in recognition of work of outstanding quality in the field of colloid and interface science.
ECIS-Solvay Prize
The European Colloid and Interface Society (ECIS) works to advance colloid and interface science and to promote cooperation between scientists. The prize is granted annually to a European scientist for original scientific work of outstanding quality, described in one or several publications, patents or other documents made public in the previous five years.
The citation of Prof Poon’s award reads: “Wilson Poon is a world-leading soft matter and biological physicist, who has made seminal contributions across many areas of colloid and interface science. The ECIS-Solvay 2020 prize is awarded for the development of a unifying framework to describe rheology of concentrated particles suspensions, mechanism of shear thickening, and an explanatory frame to account for phenomena of industrial relevance.”
Colloidial research
Based in the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Prof Poon works on 'model' colloids to study phenomena that are ubiquitous across condensed matter and statistical physics, particularly the structure and dynamics of arrested states such as glasses and gels. Understanding such states is one of the challenges facing 21st century physics, and at the same time, they occur widely in a very large range of industrial processes and products. To exploit the latter connections, Prof Poon set up the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership (ECFP) to coordinate industrial consultancy. ECFP clients now span many sectors, from food and confectionaries through personal care to specialty and agri-chemicals. The work for which he was recognised by ECIS has partly been inspired by real-life industrial problems and partly performed with industrial partners such as Mars Chocolate and Johnson Matthey. A lecture describing the relevance of his work to chocolate manufacturing can be found below under ‘Related Links’.
Prof Poon also works on the physics of active particles. These colloids are intrinsically non-equilibrium, in that they continually transduce free energy from their surroundings to engage in activities such as growth (in size and number) and self propulsion (i.e. they are micro-swimmers). The goal of Prof Poon and his team of researchers is to discover and understand new modes of collective behaviour in active particle systems, both on their own, and in the company of passive particles. The results should provide impetus for theory development in a frontier area of statistical mechanics, lead to new material designs, and throw light on selected biological phenomena (such as the growth of biofilms).