Front (L-R): Lily Pan, Tobias Hulleman, Ruvini Weerasinghe, Kevin Thomas
QAEHS researchers from HyTECH, the ARC Training Centre for Hyphenated Analytical Separation Technologies, attended an all-HyTECH meeting in February in Melbourne along with researchers from the University of Tasmania and Deakin University. The QAEHS researchers, led by Prof Kevin Thomas, included Dr Cassandra Rauert, Dr Jake O’Brien, Dr Elvis Okoffo along with four HDR students, Lily Pan, Tobias Hulleman, Ruvini Weerasinghe and Haitao Lin.
As part of the meeting, the HDR students provided either a presentation or poster to showcase their research. Lily Pan’s presentation Human exposure to micro/nanoplastics was awarded Second Place for Best Student Presentation. Tobias Hulleman presented his poster Prioritisation of persistent known and unknown chemicals using synthetic accessibility and tandem mass spectrometry and was awarded Second Place for Best Student Poster while Ruvini Weerasinghe, received Third Place for Best Student Poster for her work on Optimising methods for detecting high-performance fluoropolymers I conventional polymer mixtures.
The students also made a visit to Trajan Scientific and Medical, a HyTECH industry partner, and Lily commented that the “highlight of the trip was definitely the industry visit to Trajan Scientific and Medical. It was eye-opening to see the production of the GC columns that we work with.” Tobias was equally interested, noting that “visiting Trajan and seeing everything that goes into manufacturing and developing some of the analytical equipment that we use was super interesting and gave me a perspective I have never seen before.”
