FIBRE 2014 annual conference
Lignoworks is one of five forestry-related NSERC Strategic Networks that make up FIBRE – Forest Innovation by Research and Education. In order to encourage networking across the networks and with the wider forestry community, FIBRE held its second annual meeting May 12 – 15 on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Graduate students and post-doctoral fellows are at the heart of FIBRE’s activities and the conference began with a student-organized session on job search skills.
The forest research community in Canada has in the past year basked in the reflected glory of Prof. Derek Gray of McGill University receiving Sweden’s prestigious Wallenberg Prize in recognition of his pioneering work on cellulose nanocrystals. The conference featured a replay of Dr. Gray’s Wallenberg address, presentations on the journey of this technology from the laboratory to the 1 ton/day commercial demonstration plant built by Celluforce in Windsor, Quebec and the presentations made by FIBRE student delegates at the Wallenberg Student Symposium.
Of course, the meeting also included updates on all the current research occurring within the FIBRE networks. The Scientific Directors gave overviews of the highlights from their respective networks and plenty of detail was available in the subsequent poster sessions.
Highlights of the meeting are summarized at the FIBRE conference web site.
