2023 Victoria and Tasmania Branch Borland Forum

Source: Ivan Cole

The Borland Forum honours the memory of Dr Doug Borland who made a significant contribution to the study and teaching of metallurgy and materials engineering during his long and distinguished career. This Forum showcases high calibre postgraduate students nominated by their tertiary institution, who give a short presentation on their materials-related research project. The top presenter receives the Borland Forum Award and a cash prize.

This year the Borland Forum was hosted by RMIT University Advanced Manufacturing Precinct. Once again Victoria’s five top Universities were represented. The presentations were of a high calibre and represented a broad mix of materials research activities. The presenters and their respective topics were:

RMIT University – Jordan Noronha: High strength hollow-strut titanium lattice metamaterials by laser powder bed fusion

Monash University – Jaydeep Das: Synthetic tunable matrices for immune cell culture

University of Melbourne – Nicholas Collins: GrapheneEnhanced Single Ion Detectors for Deterministic Near-Surface Dopant Implantation in Diamond

Deakin University – Piers Coia: Multifunctional Structural Supercapacitors

Swinburne University of Technology – Daniel Ricardo: From Micro to Macro : the relationship between ice morphology and geotechnical behaviour for lunar regolith

A large crowd of Materials Australia members, post-graduate students and numerous friends and colleagues came from as far afield as Geelong and enjoyed networking and discussions over a selection of warm savouries and refreshments provided by the host venue.

Rosy Borland (Doug’s daughter) was joined by two other independent judges from private industry to determine the best presentation on the night. While the competition was fierce due to the high quality of the science and presentations, the judges determined a winner and awarded the Borland Forum Award to Piers Coia of Deakin University for his presentation on Multifunctional Structural Supercapacitors

Materials Australia would like to express our appreciation to RMIT University for hosting an excellent evening.

All five Borland Forum presenters alongside Materials Australia Victoria and Tasmania Branch Vice President Rou Jun Toh.