Award recognition for Professor Wilson Poon
Congratulations to Professor Wilson Poon whose contributions to the field of rheology have been recognised by the Eugene C. Bingham Medal.
Eugene C. Bingham Medal
The Eugene C.Bingham Medal is the highest award of the Society of Rheology and is given annually to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the field of rheology.
The citation of Professor Poon’s award reads: “By combining rheological and microstructural measurements on carefully characterized model systems, Wilson Poon has transformed our understanding of the flow of colloidal gels, attractive and repulsive colloidal glasses, and non-Brownian suspensions of frictional particles. He has thereby elucidated universal principles underpinning the formulation of many industrial products.”
The Award will be presented at the 93rd Society of Rheology Annual Meeting to be held in Chicago, Illinois in October 2022, and will be accompanied by a plenary lecture by Professor Poon.
Soft Matter and Rheology
Based in the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Professor Poon has spent many years working 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 and how they flow – the science of ‘rheology’, is one of the grand challenges facing 21st century physics; precisely because of their interesting flow properties, such states occur widely in a very large range of industrial processes and products.
To exploit the latter connections, Professor Poon set up the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership (ECFP) in 2012 to coordinate knowledge exchange with industry. ECFP clients now span many sectors, from food and confectionaries through personal care to specialty and agri-chemicals. He stresses that this is a genuine process of bidirectional knowledge exchange, and not a unidirectional ‘knowledge transfer’ from academia to industry as is often portrayed in discussions of such partnerships. Thus, some of his most impactful recent contributions, such as the work on the rheology of non-Brownian suspension mentioned in the Bingham citation, has arisen from real-life industrial problems and partly performed with industrial partners such as Mars Chocolate and Johnson Matthey.
Professor Poon’s other research interest includes suspensions of ‘active particles’ in the form of swimming bacteria. He has recently started investigating the ‘physics of death’ – how the phenomenon we call ‘life’ relies ineluctably on highly-organised processes of ‘self disassembly’ that feed back into equally highly-organised processes of ‘self assembly’. He also teaches and researches theology, the latter word being, amusingly, often a typo for the word ‘rheology’. Professor Poon is therefore looking forward to the almost inevitable announcement some day that he has been awarded the Bingham Medal for Theology!