Confirmed Speakers

Pierre Gaspard was born in Brussels, Belgium, the 6th of December 1959. He received his doctoral degree at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 1987 under the supervision of Professor Grégoire Nicolis. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Chicago from 1987 till 1989, he obtained a position at the « Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique » (FNRS Belgium). His research fields are statistical mechanics and chemical physics. In 2006, he was awared the FRANCQUI Prize in Exact Sciences. Currently, he is Professor at ULB and Director of the « Service de physique des systèmes complexes et mécanique statistique » (URL: http://complex.ulb.ac.be). He is also member of the « Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique ».

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Professor Richard A. Gross He is currently a Full Professor and a Constellation Chaired Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). His research is focused on developing biocatalytic routes to biobased materials including monomers, macromers, prepolymers, polymers, surfactants and other biochemicals. Current research programs include whole-cell routes to biosurfactants, -hydroxylation of fatty acids, protease-catalyzed peptide synthesis, engineering cutinase for polymer transformations, developing biofibers for composites and chemical conversions of biobased monomers to bioplastics and biomaterials. He has over 500 publications in peer reviewed journals, been cited about 15,000 times, edited 6-books and has 26 patents (granted or filed). Prof. Gross was the recipient of the 2003 Presidential Green Chemistry Award in the academic category. In 2010 he was selected as the Turner Alfrey Visiting Professor. He founded SyntheZyme LLC in 2009 and serves as Chief Technology officer.

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Johan Loccufier has received his PhD in polymer chemistry from the University of Ghent in 1990. His PhD thesis was focussed in synthetic strategies for the development of polymeric cytostatics, targeted at specific cancer cells.
After his PhD, Johan Loccufier joined the chemistry department of Agfa Gevaert in 1990. His initial research was focussed on the design of new organic compounds for the development of optimized silver halide based photographic materials for graphical, medical and industrial applications. Over the years his area of research was extended to all new areas where Agfa Gevaert was involved with a main focus on dry hard copy films for medical applications, digital printing plate technology for graphical applications and professional ink jet applications, enlarging the scope of the chemistry to polymers and inorganics. Since a few years, Johan Loccufier is responsible for the chemistry department within the Materials Technology Centre, the central R&D group of Agfa.
Johan Loccufier published 17 peer-reviewed scientific papers and conference proceedings as well as more than 150 international patents.
He is the current president of the Belgian Polymer Group.

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Jean-François Lutz is CNRS research director, deputy director of the Institut Charles Sadron and head of the Precision Macromolecular Chemistry Group. He received a PhD degree from the University of Montpellier in 2000 and a habilitation degree from the University of Potsdam in 2009. Before joining the CNRS in 2010 he was post for two years in the group of Kris Matyjaszewski at Carnegie Mellon University and afterwards group leader for eight years at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research in Potsdam, Germany. He is author/inventor of approximately 150 publications and patents. He received in 2008 the prize of the polymer division of the French Chemical Society. He is also an ERC laureate since 2010. His current research interests include the synthesis of sequence-controlled polymers, single-chain technologies and the preparation of information-containing macromolecules.

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