Annual summary (2014)
Dear PolyMac-Zhu Folks,
Here is my 2014 summary. In the past ten years, I used the holidays season to travel. This is probably one of the very few Christmas I spent in Hamilton. After two pretty boring days staying home having nothing to do, I decide to come office to continue revising your papers. With a few more days to go in 2014, the statistics will not change much so it’s a good time to do this report too.
1/ The year of 2014 is superb! So far, we have had 17 papers appeared, 13 accepted and 5 recently submitted. I still have 3 on hand, in hope I can get them done and submitted before the new year (no guarantee). Even not including these 3, we had a total of 35! Although about 10 were submitted last year, it’s still an excellent record of research productivity! It’s a record year so far. As the supervisor, I am very proud of the group. We are doing well. Among the papers, 60% were generated from McMaster and 40% through collaboration mainly with ZJU. We must thank our collaborators for their important contributions. I just checked our SCI record at the Web of Science. After 3 years of decline in the number of publications since 2010, we come back! The citation record continues doing well.
2/ While almost every member in the group produced in 2014, particular mentioning and thanks go to: (1) Chad Smithson published a paper in Advanced Materials. Although publishing good work, rather than publishing work in good journal, is our goal, we did try this paper to Nature first. A good lesson to learn is: in fundamental research, emphasize discovery and concept first, not fabrication and final product; (2) Yong Qian published two papers in Green Chemistry. I am not sure his work is green. But the concept of making lignin from protecting plants to protecting human beings is eye catching. ChemWorld and ScienticAmerican highlighted the paper. What left is to have a lignin based sunscreen product and some volunteers (Erlita and Sharon) to try it out. It’s free for our alumni. I believe Yong can make your face match BBQ turkey’s; (3) Qi Zhang invented O2-stimuli polymer systems. While it’s well known CO2 can switch polymers, now O2 can too. Hope this can make Qi famous (not sure he can be rich because of this, probably no chance); (4) Many published two papers this year: Erlita Mastan, Ali Mohammad Rabea, Hermes Zhu. Hermes had hard but interesting experience. Both his dopamine-assisted and electrophoretic deposition MOF works had excellent novelty, but the former was published in JACS and the later in Adv Matl in advance, by somebody else.
3/ I always believe dedication and hard work will be paid off sooner or latter. The group received a big recognition by the Royal Society of Canada. RSC represents the highest honor for Canadian scholars. Although this type of awards presented to individuals, it really recognizes the whole group through many years of hard and creative work. For this, I thank you all for the contributions. In particular, I acknowledged five former members, who made the biggest contributions in history. Our group is known to do new things while holding strong our strength. These people pioneered different areas: Wenjun Wang – long chain branched PE, Youqing Shen – ATRP supporting and reactor technology, Zhibin Ye – hyper branched PE, Santiago Faucher – ATRP only needed a ppm level of catalyst, Wei Feng – surface ATRP. Once a while, I read those old papers and I am still impressed with the creativity and the amount of work. It is my hope and also my strong belief that we will have many super five who pioneer new areas in the coming years.
4/ The group has now a webpage that also include news. Please check http://chemeng.mcmaster.ca/groups/polymac. So I am not going to repeat all the awards our people received in 2014. I also encourage you, both current and graduated, to continue sending news in.
5/ We now have a big group in size. At this moment, we have 15 (including myself): two visiting professors (Qiang Ren, Lei Yang), two postdocs (Qi Zhang, Weifeng Liu), six PhD’s (Chad Smithson, Erlita Mastan, Ali Mohammad Rabea, Hermes Zhu; Darko Ljubic, Lei Lei, Sharon Li); one Master (Dan Gariepy), two visiting PhDs (Yong Qian, Yipeng Wei). It’s a lot of manpower to a research group. But if it’s in army, I am only a squad leader. I therefore must treat each of you like a Commander so that I can get the feeling of a General. We will have quite a few graduating in 2015. And I plan to recruit quite a few too. The most rewarding thing as a professor is to see my students growing in career development. I heard a lot of good thongs about our people. Those appreciations behind you are really from their hearts. For example, last year, in the CSChE conference, Santiago Faucher received an award from Julie McLachlan. Both graduated from our group. At that moment, I felt great. I hope to see more such beautiful things in my career and I am sure we will.
6/ The overseas collaboration brought an additional benefit. We developed an exchange program with ZJU through Wen-Jun Wang’s effort. Chad spent the summer and Erlita spent a part of the autumn in Hangzhou. Both felt it was a rewarding eyes-opening experience. Dan is planning going in 2015. I strongly believe exchange programs like this benefit greatly to our students, to the next generation of working forces who require open mind, broad view and cultural understanding. For the same reason, we hosted many visitors. This is particularly true at this moment. The lab looks like a ZJU campus at Mac. Mac tried very hard to build a Mac campus in China. While the top-down approaches did not go far, the bottom-up practices succeeded in other ways.
7/ 2014 is also a big year for me. First, I completed the Chairmanship in the summer. Looking back five years, the Department changed a lot for better and much better. All the colleagues appreciated, at least they told me so, either directly or from third parties. The department recruited many young and highly active people. During the years, the department continued improving research and teaching with both areas highly ranked. While I was dedicated and succeeded, I felt our research was struggling. Indeed, the number of papers declined year by year and the citation became stagnant. Thanks to the understanding of colleagues, I moved from JHE 373 to JHE A415 in June. The current one is like a paradise for research. With big windows in both south and west, I have a lot of sunshine and a perfect view. Hope it improve my vision in research too. I am glad outside the windows were not a beach with distractive things moving around.
8/ Also worth mentioning are my accomplishments in (1) changing my hair back to natural color and (2) reducing my body weight to normal. Started 10 years ago, I colored my hair because my mother felt sad with my grey hair (I was, and probably I am still, the only person in my family and among my friends in elementary and high schools having grey hair). Shortly, I found dyeing hair was the worst thing for human being, but once started, it’s hard to stop, because for many months it’s half white and half black, looking like an actor in circus troupe. Finally, I made it. I am feeling much better now. Good friends often asked me: “are you ok?” or “anything wrong?” Actually, nothing wrong and I am perfectly OK, if not much better. Also early of the year, Santiago and I had beer (once a while I do), he looked slimmer but very spirit. He shared experience of reducing weight. It’s simple. It’s all about chemical engineering principles: mass balance and heat balance! I started applying the same principles. It worked very well. In three months, I cut 10 pounds and almost normalized my body mass index, kg/m^2 <25. I considered it as a big accomplishment and hope I can keep it. Many people spent big money no success. I did not pay Santiago any but made it happen.
Now, I feel the desire to have a couple of wine or some tequila left from the trip to Puerto Vallarta. Sorry for those still waiting for my revision of papers. Be patient.
Happy 2015!
Shiping Zhu
Here is my 2014 summary. In the past ten years, I used the holidays season to travel. This is probably one of the very few Christmas I spent in Hamilton. After two pretty boring days staying home having nothing to do, I decide to come office to continue revising your papers. With a few more days to go in 2014, the statistics will not change much so it’s a good time to do this report too.
1/ The year of 2014 is superb! So far, we have had 17 papers appeared, 13 accepted and 5 recently submitted. I still have 3 on hand, in hope I can get them done and submitted before the new year (no guarantee). Even not including these 3, we had a total of 35! Although about 10 were submitted last year, it’s still an excellent record of research productivity! It’s a record year so far. As the supervisor, I am very proud of the group. We are doing well. Among the papers, 60% were generated from McMaster and 40% through collaboration mainly with ZJU. We must thank our collaborators for their important contributions. I just checked our SCI record at the Web of Science. After 3 years of decline in the number of publications since 2010, we come back! The citation record continues doing well.
2/ While almost every member in the group produced in 2014, particular mentioning and thanks go to: (1) Chad Smithson published a paper in Advanced Materials. Although publishing good work, rather than publishing work in good journal, is our goal, we did try this paper to Nature first. A good lesson to learn is: in fundamental research, emphasize discovery and concept first, not fabrication and final product; (2) Yong Qian published two papers in Green Chemistry. I am not sure his work is green. But the concept of making lignin from protecting plants to protecting human beings is eye catching. ChemWorld and ScienticAmerican highlighted the paper. What left is to have a lignin based sunscreen product and some volunteers (Erlita and Sharon) to try it out. It’s free for our alumni. I believe Yong can make your face match BBQ turkey’s; (3) Qi Zhang invented O2-stimuli polymer systems. While it’s well known CO2 can switch polymers, now O2 can too. Hope this can make Qi famous (not sure he can be rich because of this, probably no chance); (4) Many published two papers this year: Erlita Mastan, Ali Mohammad Rabea, Hermes Zhu. Hermes had hard but interesting experience. Both his dopamine-assisted and electrophoretic deposition MOF works had excellent novelty, but the former was published in JACS and the later in Adv Matl in advance, by somebody else.
3/ I always believe dedication and hard work will be paid off sooner or latter. The group received a big recognition by the Royal Society of Canada. RSC represents the highest honor for Canadian scholars. Although this type of awards presented to individuals, it really recognizes the whole group through many years of hard and creative work. For this, I thank you all for the contributions. In particular, I acknowledged five former members, who made the biggest contributions in history. Our group is known to do new things while holding strong our strength. These people pioneered different areas: Wenjun Wang – long chain branched PE, Youqing Shen – ATRP supporting and reactor technology, Zhibin Ye – hyper branched PE, Santiago Faucher – ATRP only needed a ppm level of catalyst, Wei Feng – surface ATRP. Once a while, I read those old papers and I am still impressed with the creativity and the amount of work. It is my hope and also my strong belief that we will have many super five who pioneer new areas in the coming years.
4/ The group has now a webpage that also include news. Please check http://chemeng.mcmaster.ca/groups/polymac. So I am not going to repeat all the awards our people received in 2014. I also encourage you, both current and graduated, to continue sending news in.
5/ We now have a big group in size. At this moment, we have 15 (including myself): two visiting professors (Qiang Ren, Lei Yang), two postdocs (Qi Zhang, Weifeng Liu), six PhD’s (Chad Smithson, Erlita Mastan, Ali Mohammad Rabea, Hermes Zhu; Darko Ljubic, Lei Lei, Sharon Li); one Master (Dan Gariepy), two visiting PhDs (Yong Qian, Yipeng Wei). It’s a lot of manpower to a research group. But if it’s in army, I am only a squad leader. I therefore must treat each of you like a Commander so that I can get the feeling of a General. We will have quite a few graduating in 2015. And I plan to recruit quite a few too. The most rewarding thing as a professor is to see my students growing in career development. I heard a lot of good thongs about our people. Those appreciations behind you are really from their hearts. For example, last year, in the CSChE conference, Santiago Faucher received an award from Julie McLachlan. Both graduated from our group. At that moment, I felt great. I hope to see more such beautiful things in my career and I am sure we will.
6/ The overseas collaboration brought an additional benefit. We developed an exchange program with ZJU through Wen-Jun Wang’s effort. Chad spent the summer and Erlita spent a part of the autumn in Hangzhou. Both felt it was a rewarding eyes-opening experience. Dan is planning going in 2015. I strongly believe exchange programs like this benefit greatly to our students, to the next generation of working forces who require open mind, broad view and cultural understanding. For the same reason, we hosted many visitors. This is particularly true at this moment. The lab looks like a ZJU campus at Mac. Mac tried very hard to build a Mac campus in China. While the top-down approaches did not go far, the bottom-up practices succeeded in other ways.
7/ 2014 is also a big year for me. First, I completed the Chairmanship in the summer. Looking back five years, the Department changed a lot for better and much better. All the colleagues appreciated, at least they told me so, either directly or from third parties. The department recruited many young and highly active people. During the years, the department continued improving research and teaching with both areas highly ranked. While I was dedicated and succeeded, I felt our research was struggling. Indeed, the number of papers declined year by year and the citation became stagnant. Thanks to the understanding of colleagues, I moved from JHE 373 to JHE A415 in June. The current one is like a paradise for research. With big windows in both south and west, I have a lot of sunshine and a perfect view. Hope it improve my vision in research too. I am glad outside the windows were not a beach with distractive things moving around.
8/ Also worth mentioning are my accomplishments in (1) changing my hair back to natural color and (2) reducing my body weight to normal. Started 10 years ago, I colored my hair because my mother felt sad with my grey hair (I was, and probably I am still, the only person in my family and among my friends in elementary and high schools having grey hair). Shortly, I found dyeing hair was the worst thing for human being, but once started, it’s hard to stop, because for many months it’s half white and half black, looking like an actor in circus troupe. Finally, I made it. I am feeling much better now. Good friends often asked me: “are you ok?” or “anything wrong?” Actually, nothing wrong and I am perfectly OK, if not much better. Also early of the year, Santiago and I had beer (once a while I do), he looked slimmer but very spirit. He shared experience of reducing weight. It’s simple. It’s all about chemical engineering principles: mass balance and heat balance! I started applying the same principles. It worked very well. In three months, I cut 10 pounds and almost normalized my body mass index, kg/m^2 <25. I considered it as a big accomplishment and hope I can keep it. Many people spent big money no success. I did not pay Santiago any but made it happen.
Now, I feel the desire to have a couple of wine or some tequila left from the trip to Puerto Vallarta. Sorry for those still waiting for my revision of papers. Be patient.
Happy 2015!
Shiping Zhu