A webinar on Potential Anti-Viral and Anti-Bacterial Nanomaterials Applications Including Covid Pandemic was successfully carried out on 28 September 2020 via live stream on Faculty of Science Facebook. This Webinar was organized by the Advanced Optical Materials Research Group (AOMRG) in-collaboration with The NorthCap University (NCU), India.
The Director of the program, Dr. Nurhafizah Hasim together with all AOMRG members organised a wonderful and successful webinar between Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) and NCU. Moreover, collaborative activity such as Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has come out through this webinar and was sealed between both universities.
Basically, this webinar was conducted with a purpose to share ideas, knowledge and benefits between lecturers and students in the field of material applications related to the latest pandemic Covid-19. The webinar was organized by the Frontier Materials Research Alliance and co-organized by Faculty of Science, UTM for Online Global Classroom (OGC).
The speakers from each university took part in sharing inputs related to the theme “Potential Anti-Viral and Anti-Bacterial Nanomaterials Applications Including Covid Pandemic”, Assoc. Prof. Sib Krishna Ghoshal (UTM) and Dr. Sunita Sharma (NCU).
The webinar focused on the contagious diseases due to the fatal pathogens, microbes, bacteria and viruses including the newest Coronavirus that turned out to be the main distress globally. Both speakers suggested that the nanomaterials were a promising route to achieve surface disinfection in a simple, cost-effective, and secure way, as diverse metallic nanoparticles have been exploited as the spray or coatings to manipulate the surfaces of various materials in the market nowadays.
The nanoparticles of Cu, Ag, Au, SiO2, TiO2 and ZnO because of their excellent chemical durability, environmental amicability, strong surface reactivity, bio-compatible, non-toxic and inexpensive nature are materialized as efficient antimicrobial agents in the nanomedicine. Therefore, nanomaterials had a high antimicrobial performance of these nanomaterials make them suitable to combat bio-deterioration.
To date, the OGC managed to attract a total of 202 participants from 18 different universities in five different countries, where 123 were undergraduate students, 41 were postgraduate students, and 37 were the university staff. Apart from that, a total of 57 UTM alumni also gave their support to this program.
Prepared by:
Dr. Nurhafizah binti Hasim
Director of Program
Department of Physics, Faculty of Science.