Students Awarded their PhDs at the March Graduation Ceremony
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Aaron JamesPhD thesis was on 'The Development of Composite Materials from Waste Paper and Plastic'. The thesis focused on the manufacture of an economic product from waste paper and plastics, usually destined for landfill. The work involved pre-processing, manufacture and comprehensive material property testing and characterisation of the materials.
Aaron has a mechanical engineering background with a BEng (Hons) from the University of Western
Australia. At Swinburne, he initially started his time at the Industrial Research Institute of Swinburne (IRIS) on an industry collaborative Masters by Research in late 2002, which he then converted to a PhD in mid 2003. He worked in Canberra while completing his thesis at the same time.
Aaron hopes to continue research work in some form, possibly in composite materials. He says “since completing my PhD my experience working at DSTO (Defence Science Technology Organisation) has kept me interested in reaching this goal I'd like to thank my mentors (and supervisors) Dr Igor Sbarski from Swinburne, Edward Kosior as well as Jacob Muzunski and Volker Hurth who provided exceptional help and support.
Craig Lincolncommenced his time at Swinburne studying the Bachelor of Applied Science (Chemistry) in 1994 and then moved on to study the photodissociation (breaking apart) of myoglobin/hemoglobin bound to carbon monoxide (CO) using femtosecond laser spectroscopy for his PhD.
There were two main focuses of his research i) to develop a new laser technique that could be used to
determine photochemical dynamics on a femtosecond timescale (1 femtosecond [fs] = 0.000000000000001
seconds) or very short; and ii) to determine the very rapid events leading to the bond breakage (dissociation) between myoglobin/haemoglobin and carbon monoxide to better understand how they function as oxygen
carriers in the blood stream.
He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Melbourne where he is investigating new methods to improve the resolution of fluorescence microscopes to image Malaria infected red blood cells. In the future Craig hopes to find a postdoctoral position in Europe and continue his development of laser spectroscopy techniques and their application to biologically relevant chemical reactions. In the immediate future he will spend a month in Vienna to perform some complex laser spectroscopic experiments on fluorescent proteins which he says is very exciting! “Vienna is a beautiful city, I got to go there as a part of my PhD and have been back once already he said. “The people I would like to thank for getting me where I am include Prof Peter Hannaford, Prof Lap Van Dao, Dr Wayne Rowlands, Dr Margaret Wong and Dr Greg Lonergan at Swinburne.
Caixian Tang studied both his Bachelors degree (NCUT) and Masters (USTB) of Mechanical Engineering in China and then came to Australia to undertake his PhD at Swinburne, which was supported by the CRC CAST Scholarship.
Caixian's PhD thesis investigated soldering phenomenon in magnesium high pressure die casting (HPDC) and the overcome by surface engineering. He is currently working to develop thin and thick metallic coatings using cold spray technology, and the post treatment of the coatings. During his PhD, he worked closely with Prof Milan Brandt and as a CRC CAST student he carried out most of his experimental work at CSIRO, supervised by Dr Mahnaz Jahedi.
Currently, Caixian is working at CSRIO with Dr Mahnaz Jahedi at CSIRO as a Materials Engineer, and hopes to further develop his research in light metal area for the Australian industry.