Ph.D. student wins best poster award at international conference:

Merfat Alsabban, a Ph.D. candidate in the Chemical Science Program of the Physical Science and Engineering Division at KAUST, won a best poster award at the 18th Asian Chemical Congress (18th ACC) held at the Taipei International Convention Center in Taiwan in December 8-12, 2019.

Merfat is supervised by Professor Kuo-Wei Huang and co-advised by Professor Vincent Tung and works in the KAUST Catalysis Center (KCC).

Her poster, "Design and Mechanistic Study of Highly-durable Carbon Coated Cobalt Diphosphide Core-shell Nanostructure Electrocatalyst for the Efficient and Stable Oxygen Evolution Reaction" was selected as one of the best from more than 150 posters that were presented at the conference. There were two-stages of competition for the "Best of the Best Prize", which comprised poster and then oral presentations and Merfat won both stages.

Merfat's research seeks solutions to replace fossil fuels with clean energy through production of hydrogen by applying electrochemical water splitting.  Hydrogen is considered one of the most promising future options as a pollution-free energy carrier and is obtained from abundant and renewable resources.

"The award brings a great opportunity for the international recognition of KAUST's high quality research which can motivate KAUST  researchers to deliver our discoveries globally" Merfat said.