Highlights from the 2026 Gordon Research Conference on Membranes: Materials & Processes
Bringing Together the Membrane Community to Shape the Future of Separation Technology
That's a wrap on the 2026 Gordon Research Conferences on Membranes: Materials & Processes, held August 2–7 at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH.
Five days, 22 talks, two poster sessions, and a great deal of unpublished work discussed in a room where it stayed. The theme was "Future Directions of Membranes for Transforming Separation Technology," and the program ranged from next-generation polymer architectures to resource recovery of critical elements, electrochemical separations, porous materials, and AI and ML for membrane discovery.
What we will remember most is the discussion. Nearly every session ran to the end of its allotted time and then kept going over lunch, and a striking amount of that was driven by graduate students and postdocs asking the hard questions. That is what this meeting is for.
Thank you to my co-chair Haiqing Lin, to our vice chairs Christine Duval and Ngai Yin Yip, and to our Power Hour organizers Christina Carbrello and Alyson Sagle Beldon. Thank you to the GRC staff, who make all of this run.
To our speakers and discussion leaders — all listed in our program post from April — thank you for the time, the travel, and the willingness to share work before it is published.
We are grateful to our sponsors: National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Liquide, Membrane Applications Science & Technology (MAST) Center, Chevron, Air Products Membrane Solutions, MilliporeSigma, American Chemical Society Publications, and University of Colorado Boulder College of Engineering.
More information can be found here.
“The Gordon Research Conferences provide an international forum for the presentation and discussion of frontier research in the biological, chemical, physical and engineering sciences and their interfaces.”
About our work
We design and create high-performance membranes that enable unprecedented separation opportunities. We pursue fundamental breakthroughs that translate into real-world applications, always seeking to bridge the microscopic understanding of materials with macroscopic performance. Our goal is to make separations systems cleaner, stronger, and more sustainable.
About the Oh Lab
At the Oh Lab, we are dedicated to advancing the world’s most important, but challenging, separations in the environment, energy, and health sector. We do this by focusing on the molecular-to-macroscopic design and characterization of polymer membranes. We work at the intersection of chemical engineering, materials science, and molecular transport, focusing on designing advanced polymer membranes for efficient chemical separation.