Confirmed Speakers

Prof. Richard Hoogenboom was born in 1978 in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and studied chemical engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands). In 2005, he obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Ulrich S. Schubert and continued working as a project leader for the Dutch Polymer Institute, partially combined with a position as senior product developer at Dolphys Medical BV. After postdoctoral training at the RWTH Aachen with Prof. Martin Moeller and at the Radboud University Nijmegen with Prof. Roeland Nolte, he was appointed as associate professor at Ghent University in 2010 and in October 2014 he was promoted to full professor. His research focuses on adaptive and responsive materials based on stimuli-responsive polymers, supramolecular polymers, and poly(2-oxazoline)s. Prof. Hoogenboom has published more than 275 refereed scientific articles (h-index 51) and is currently associate editor for European Polymer Journal and Australian Journal of Chemistry.

Close window

Renaud Nicolaÿ, born in France, received a Ph.D. degree from Pierre & Marie Curie University in 2008 and from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009, working in the field of controlled radical polymerization under the supervision of Pr. Patrick Hémery and Pr. Krzysztof Matyjaszewski. In 2010, he joined the group of Pr. E. W. Meijer at the Eindhoven University of Technology working as a postdoctoral researcher on supramolecular chemistry. In September 2010, he took a position of assistant professor at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI Paris), where he joined the Soft Matter and Chemistry Laboratory. His work focuses on macromolecular engineering with particular emphasis on the development of new synthetic methodologies as well as on the design and development of dynamic organic and hybrid materials, such as vitrimers.

Close window

Anja Palmans obtained a degree in chemical engineering (1992) at the Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands) and continued with PhD on the topic of supramolecular chemistry (1997) in the group of Prof. E. W. Meijer. After a Postdoc in the group of Prof. P. Smith at the ETH Zürich (Switzerland) and working at DSM Research (The Netherlands), she became assistant professor at the department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the TU Eindhoven in 2005.
She is now an Associate Professor in the field of Macro-Organic Chemistry and focuses on the supramolecular polymerization of small molecules into well-defined ordered architectures and the controlled folding of macromolecules with pendant recognition motifs, to achieve enzyme-like activity in (cascade) catalytic reactions.

Close window

Friedrich Georg Schmidt studied chemistry at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i.Br.. After he got his PhD in Freiburg and a post-doc fellowship at the University of Karlsruhe he started his career in the central research department of the former Hüls AG in Marl / Germany. 1986 he became head of a new polymer blend pilot plant and the product development and quality control teams of two special engineering plastic families. 1996 he was appointed to join the Screening Committee of the Hüls AG, which evaluated trends and derived business options for the Hüls AG. As member of the management team of the Creavis GmbH, which was founded to conduct research to develop these business options, he headed several international projects since 1997. In 2002 he became responsible for the product development department in the Business Unit Coatings & Additives of Evonik Degussa. 2008 he became head of the Innovation Management - New Technologies within the Business Unit Coatings & Additives. Since 2013 he is responsible for the Intrapreneur project Composites 2.0 within the Project House Composites at the Evonik Creavis GmbH, the Strategic Research Unit of the Evonik Industries AG.

Close window

Dr. Andreas Walther graduated from Bayreuth University in Germany in 2008 with a Ph.D. focusing on the self-assembly behavior and applications of Janus particles and other soft, complex colloids. After a postdoctoral stay with a focus on biomimetic hybrid materials at Aalto University (Helsinki, Finland), he returned to Germany and established his independent research group at the DWI – Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials in Aachen. His research interests concentrate on developing and understanding hierarchical self-assembly concepts inside and outside equilibrium, and on utilizing and connecting such processes to soft materials research – often following bioinspired design principles. A. Walther has published around 100 papers and has recently been awarded an ERC Starting grant, the Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award (for Materials) and the Reimund Stadler Young Investigator Award of the German Chemical Society.

Close window

Jessica Clough grew up in Leighton Buzzard, England. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge in Natural Sciences, with a graduation project in the group of Prof. Jeremy Sanders on the self-assembly of topologically complex molecules from naphthalenediimide-based disulfide building blocks in water. At the end of 2012, she began her PhD at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven under the guidance of Prof. Rint Sijbesma, focusing on the development of mechanically induced chemiluminescence as a force probe for polymeric materials

Close window

Close window