Kate Stewart is currently working on her PhD with Professor Penlidis. She received two awards for her research work a two different conferences. One was for the best poster (one of three out of over 65 posters) at the prestigious Polymer Reaction Engineering Conference IX in Cancun, Mexico (May 10-15, 2015). The other was 2nd place overall (out of 60+ posters) in the poster competition at the Annual AUTO21 conference in Ottawa, ON (May 26-27, 2015).
Kate's research goal is to design polymeric sensing materials to be used in transdermal ethanol sensors. This goal forms a set of operating specifications that pose certain constraints on the type of sensing materials used in such a sensor. The type of sensor used (resistive vs. capacitive vs. micro-cantilever) further reduces the number of potential sensing materials. Therefore, looking a the chemical nature of ethanol, and determining how ethanol is likely to interact with a sensing material, polymeric sensing materials may be tailored through changing its backbone, its side chains and functional groups, and/or by adding dopants (metal oxides). Using the approach has allowed her to identify a multiplied of good sensing materials for ethanol (eg. poly, o-anisidine, etc).