ChE Graduate Student Receives International Travel Awards

July 24, 2006

Michelle L. Somers, chemical engineering doctoral student under the direction of Mary Wornat, has received two travel awards to attend the 31st Combustion Symposium which will be held in Heidelberg, Germany in August 2006.  Somers will be presenting a paper entitled, “The formation of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons from the Supercritical Pyrolysis of 1-Methylnaphthalene” at the symposium.

The first travel award is from the Combustion Institute itself, in the amount of $700.  The second, larger award, is the James E. Peters Fellowship from the Central States Section of the Combustion Institute.  The fellowship is a competition for students who will be presenting work for the 31st Combustion Symposium.  Only one student is selected for the award which is valued at $1,500.

Unlike most scientific research conferences, the International Combustion Symposium requires submission of a full journal-style article 8 months prior to the meeting. These papers are fully peer-reviewed, with acceptance rates lower than most journals.  This year only 42 % of the 1,000 papers submitted were accepted, and only a minority of these are from graduate students.  Somers’ paper will be published in Proceedings of the Combustion Institute 31 (2006).