News
CNG members score best presentation awards
August 2026
Congratulations to CNG members on their recent presentation awards at the 2026 International Conference on Materials Innovation held on 13–15 August in Brisbane.
CNG postdoc Dr Yuang Gu won the Early Career Researcher Lecture Award for his talk entitled Metal–Phenolic Network Nanoparticles for Organ-Selective Delivery.
Honorary CNG PhD student Haofu Liu received the Best HDR Student Presentation Award for his talk entitled Silane-Enabled Metal–Phenolic Networks with Tunable Wettability. Haofu is pursuing a PhD degree in the School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, Faculty of Science, The University of Melbourne under the joint supervision of Prof. Deli Chen and CNG research fellow Dr Omid Mazaheri.
CNG review article in Nature Reviews Chemistry featured on front cover
July 2026
A collaborative review article between CNG and Prof. Shuaijun Pan and his team (Hunan University) has been highlighted on the front cover Nature Reviews Chemistry. The review entitled “Fluorine-Free Super-Repellency to Water and Organic Liquids” provides a timely and comprehensive account of recent advances in fluorine-free super-repellency. Specifically, the review details design strategies based on anisotropic microstructures, hierarchical roughness, and non-fluorinated surface chemistries, alongside theoretical frameworks that correlate structure, interfacial energies, and wetting dynamics. Emerging applications in diverse fields—from self-cleaning coatings to anti-icing and biomedical materials—are outlined, as well as key challenges and future research opportunities.
By bridging theory, materials design, and practical applications, this review aims to inspire innovation toward the development of environmentally friendly, scalable and multifunctional super-repellent technologies.
CNG postdoc scores Best Postdoctoral Presentation Award
June 2026
Congratulations to CNG postdoc Dr Jingqu Chen on winning the Best Oral Presentation Award at the 16th International Nanomedicine Conference held on 22–24 June 2026 in Sydney. Jingqu’s talk was entitled Bioactive Metal–Organic Nanoparticles: A Versatile Platform for Therapeutic Delivery.
CNG article in Advanced Materials highlighted on inside front cover
January 2026
A collaborative article has been highlighted on the inside front cover of Advanced Materials. This article entitled “Polyphenol-Mediated Engineering of Lipid Nanoparticles with Crystalline Mesophases” presents a one-step assembly strategy for engineering a new class of nonlamellar lipid nanoparticles. Through simply varying the assembly building blocks, the polyphenol-mediated strategy enables the modulation of the nonlamellar structures, resulting in tuneable sizes (90‒420 nm), lattice parameters (106‒151Å), and different nanostructures (multilamellar and hexagonal). Such flexibility allows the design delivery systems for different classes of therapeutic molecules, thereby offering opportunities to tailor such materials to different delivery needs.
This collaborative study was conducted by CNG, the Nanomedicine and Gene Therapeutics Laboratory (headed by Dr. Yi (David) Ju) at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute and La Trobe University, and colleagues from RMIT University.