Professor Ian Hutchings, GKN Professor of Manufacturing Engineering at the IfM, gave the Staudinger-Durrer lecture at the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich) where he was awarded the Staudinger-Durrer Prize and Medal.

The lecture was given as part of the Materials Day 2007 – 'Sticking and Sliding, Wearing and Tearing symposium' which addressed cutting edge research in the field of tribology and its significance for Materials Science, Biology, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. Professor Hutchings' lecture was on 'Manufacturing by subtractive and additive processes: wear and inkjet printing'. New experimental techniques involving high-speed photography and digital image analysis are being used in the IfM’s Inkjet Research Centre to study the development of small-scale liquid jets and drops, and recent results from this work were reviewed.