NMG Lunchtime Seminar Series: Focus on Lignin

Dr Florence Gschwend

CTO and Co-founder , Lixea

Florence Gschwend is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College and co-founder and CEO of Lixea Limited. She received her BSc in Chemistry from the University of Basel, Switzerland. After internships at the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Poland, and Syngenta in Basel, Switzerland, she moved to London to do an MRes in Green Chemistry at Imperial College London where she worked on ionic liquid droplets as microreactors under the supervision of Dr. Jason Hallett and Dr. Phil Miller.

From September 2013 to June 2017 she worked on her PhD project at the Chemical Engineering Department and the Grantham Institute under the supervision of Dr. Jason Hallett and Dr. Paul Fennell on the use of CCA-treated waste wood as a raw material for biorefining using ionic liquids. As part of her PhD, she also spent two months at JBEI where she worked on hydrothermal treatment of algae residue and lignin together with Dr. Anthe George. Since finishing her PhD she has co-founded Lixea to commercialise the ionic liquid-based biomass fractionation process she worked on during her PhD.

Professor Maurice N Collins

Senior Lecturer, University of Limerick

Dr Maurice N Collins is a senior lecturer in the School of Engineering at the University of Limerick. The principal focus of his research group is on the structure/property/processing relationships of biopolymers/hydrogels in the application areas of regenerative medicine, Tissue Engineering, drug delivery, and pharmaceutics.  Maurice has a strong track record in attracting funding to enable his research.

He is the lead PI and coordinator of the H2020 LIBRE consortium, which focuses on next generation biomaterials and is involved as PI in multiple nationally funded programmes. He is a funded investigator in the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) advanced materials and bioengineering center (AMBER) based at Trinity College Dublin. His research group is interdisciplinary including Materials Scientists, Chemists, Biologists, Pharmacists and Engineers, with current areas of interest including the development of bioinks for 3D bioprinting, the development of multifunctional nanomaterials and immunomodulatory materials as well as fundamental 3D tissue scaffold and hydrogel work.

Maurice is the editor of the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules published by Elsevier and sits on the editorial board of Carbohydrate Polymers. His current h -index is 34 and his citations have reached circa 4k.

Dr Andy West

Chief Chemist, Bio-Sep Limited

Chartered Chemist and a Chartered Scientist, Andy has extensive experience providing innovation consultancy and technology transfer support for SMEs, particularly related to sustainability, waste as a resource and climate change mitigation. Andy looks after all of the chemistry aspects of Bio-Sep from processing, handling product separation, and also all the front-end research and development.