PhD Candidate Tara Huang Honored with Women in Chemical Engineering Travel Award
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Tara Huang, a PhD candidate in the College of Natural Sciences’s Department of Polymer Science and Engineering (PSE), was recently recognized with a Women in Chemical Engineering (WIC) Travel Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). She also received a Research and Travel Grant from the UMass Graduate Student Government. The awards supported Huang’s participation in the most recent AIChE Annual Meeting, held in Boston, where she presented research on rapid fabrication of heteroatom-doped porous carbon fibers.
“I’m incredibly grateful to receive this recognition,” expressed Huang. “Presenting my research at a national conference gave me the opportunity to exchange ideas with researchers from around the world and showcase the innovative work taking place at UMass. I was also honored to be invited to the WIC Networking Event, where I connected with inspiring women in STEM and learned from their experiences. The event reinforced the importance of building a supportive community, and I hope to contribute to that culture by sharing what I learned with my peers at UMass.”
The WIC Travel Award celebrates Huang’s work, which contributes to the development of advanced porous carbon materials that can be used in applications such as environmental remediation, energy storage, and chemical separations. The recognition also highlights the contributions of women researchers in STEM fields.
Porous carbon materials are widely used in technologies such as water purification systems, and energy storage devices such as batteries and supercapacitors. Developing new fabrication strategies for these materials may enable more scalable production while providing better control of pore structure and material properties for different applications.
“My research focuses on making special carbon materials that contain many tiny holes,” explains Huang. “These holes can trap chemicals or store energy, which makes the materials useful for things like cleaning polluted water or improving energy technologies. Our method can produce these materials in less than 40 minutes, while traditional techniques can take several hours or even days.”
Huang presented this research at the AIChE event in an oral presentation and during the WIC poster session.
“Participating in the Women in Chemical Engineering events at AIChE was incredibly inspiring,” Huang said. “Communities like WIC play an important role in connecting and supporting women scientists while encouraging the next generation of women engineers.”
Learn more about AIChE’s Women in Chemical Engineering Travel Award.