Congratulations to PhD student Panatpong Hutacharoen on being awarded the 2016 Anglo-Thai Education Award for Excellence in Engineering and Technology

We are delighted to announce that Panatpong (Obb) Hutacharoen, PhD student in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London, has been awarded the prestigious Educational Award for Excellence in the area of engineering and technology by the Anglo-Thai Society.

Panatpong Hutacharoen with one of his supervisors, Professor George Jackson

The Anglo-Thai Education Awards for Excellence recognise the exceptional academic achievements of Thai postgraduate scholars in the UK and are strongly supported by the Royal Thai Embassy. Founded in 2005, the Engineering and Technology category has been awarded to students from Imperial since 2010, and Panatpong is the third student in a row to receive the award from the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Panatpong started his PhD in 2013 based in the Molecular Systems Engineering group, co-supervised by Professors Claire Adjiman, Amparo Galindo and George Jackson. His work is focused around advanced molecular engineering approaches to predict thermodynamic properties from molecular structures. He has developed molecular-based models based on the Statistical Associating Fluid Theory to predict complex interaction of aqueous systems including an accurate prediction of the octanol-water partition coefficient and the solubility of active pharmaceutical ingredients which are key properties in drug design. He has also contributed to the development of a novel effective approach to treat intramolecular hydrogen bonds, which is prevalent in medicinal chemistry but often under-recognised and seldom predicted. His work has a broad range of applications in industrial products and processes.

On receiving the award Panatpong said, “It is a great privilege to be selected for the Educational Awards for Excellence. Before I joined the Molecular Systems Engineering group at Imperial I worked in a medical chemistry laboratory and I quickly realised that experiments could be better designed by a more systematic approach obtained using theory rather than trial and error. If one says ‘an afternoon in the library (would mean in Google Scholar nowadays) could save a month in a lab’, think about how much a day in a computational lab would save us in terms of both time and resources.”

Congratulations again to Panatpong on this excellent achievement, on behalf of the Department of Chemical Engineering we wish him continued success and all the best in the future.

Photos courtesy of the Anglo-Thai Society.

Cover photo: Panatpong Hutacharoen receiving his award from former British Ambassador to Thailand and Honorary Chairman for International Beverages Holdings Limited, Mr Quinton Quayle.