PhD student Dániel Gardenö awarded 2nd place at prestigious international conference in USA
Science at UCT Prague stands up to international competition. This was recently confirmed by the success of Ing. Dániel Gardenö, a PhD student from the research group of Prof. Karel Friess, who won second place for best student poster at NAMS 2025, held in Nashville, USA.
PhD student Dániel Gardenö, MSc. from the research group of Prof. Karel Friess, received the award for the second-best student poster at the North American Membrane Society (NAMS) 2025 conference in Nashville, among 155 students from the USA, Europe, and Asia. Dániel presented the results of his work focused on using composite membrane materials he prepared from 2D-carbon nanotubes and graphene oxide for ultrafiltration separation of mixtures of polyethylene glycol (PEG) homologues. The work was created in collaboration with colleagues from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) in Erlangen, where Dániel stayed for 12 months thanks to a scholarship received from the Bayerisch-Tschechische Hochschulagentur (BTHA). In cooperation with FAU, the topic will be continued, as the joint FAU-VŠCHT project entitled "Novel precisely tunable 2D-membranes for targeted liquid separation via ultrafiltration" (for the time period 1/6-30/11/2025), received the maximum possible funding of 5 thousand Euros from BTHA as part of the call for support of Czech-Bavarian academic projects in 2025.
Dániel Gardenö has said: "I’m incredibly pleased with the result, especially given the strong competition. This was the largest membrane conference in the United States, with around 550 participants. There were 155 posters in the poster session, and I was the only person from Europe to receive an award. As a member of the European Membrane Society (EMS), I wasn’t just representing our research group and UCT Prague, but the entire European membrane community."
More information about Dániel's composite membrane materials can be found in the manuscript D. Gardenö et al., J. Membr. Sci 729, 2025, 124156 👉https://doi.org/10.1016/j.memsci.2025.124156