Manchester students net IChemE sustainability prize

Manchester, UK – A project to turn corn waste into succinic acid has earned an international sustainability prize for team of students from the University of Manchester.

The seven-strong team won the IChemE’s inaugural McNab-Lacey student design prize, which is open to final-year chemical engineering students from IChemE accredited universities worldwide.

The winning project involved designing a process for producing succinic acid from corn waste using the microorganism Actinobacillicus succinogenes.

The team was made up of final-year students Liam Booth, Maryam Ojetola, Sarah Bickerton, Richard Gowers, Sophie Wilkinson, Vanessa Suniggi and Andrew Harrison. They were mentored by chemical engineering professor Colin Webb.

When asked what they had taken from the project the team explained that it had given them an appreciation of how “incredibly iterative” the design process is, and spoke of how hard - and rewarding - it is to work with a team under incredibly stressful conditions. If you couldn’t adapt,” they said, “you couldn’t get through it.”

Malcolm Wilkinson, chair of the IChemE Sustainability special interest group and head of the judging panel, said the team had “clearly taken the idea of sustainability right through the project, from the initial concept to the final design.”

Less than half of the teams vying for the award came from UK universities, with two entries coming in from Malaysia and a commended effort from Singapore Polytechnic clinching second place.

Caption: Student presentations left to right: Colin Webb, Maryan Ojetola, Andrew Harrison, Vanessa Suinggi, Liam Booth, Sarah Bickerton, Malcolm Wilkinson, Sophie Wilkinson