Plenary Speakers

Professor Bronwyn Fox is Chief Scientist of CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency and innovation catalyst.
CSIRO solves the greatest challenges through innovative science and technology.
Professor Bronwyn Fox joined CSIRO in October 2021 and became CSIRO’s fourth female Chief Scientist. She is known globally as a leader in advanced manufacturing, materials science, and industry 4.0 technologies, and is passionate about bringing together multidisciplinary teams for collaborative research.
In her former role as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise) at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, she built extensively on Australia’s Industry 4.0 strategy. As founding Director of Swinburne’s Manufacturing Futures Research Institute, she led several significant initiatives and global research partnerships, including the establishment of a world first Industry 4.0 Testlab for additive manufacturing of carbon fibre composites, in collaboration with CSIRO.
Bronwyn has demonstrated a sustained commitment to support the growth of the carbon fibre and composite industry in Australia through targeted research and was previously a co-founder of the Carbon Nexus facility at Deakin University. A core part of a $100 million dollar precinct in Geelong, Carbon Nexus acted as a catalyst for other companies to invest in the region, creating a thriving manufacturing precinct.
Bronwyn is a Fellow of the Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
In 2018 she was awarded the Global Congress on Manufacturing and Management (GCMM) Research Leadership Award, and in 2020 she was awarded the Royal Society of Victoria Medal for Excellence in Scientific Research.

Elizabeth Gillies is a Canada Research Chair and Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, and School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Western Ontario. She obtained her B.Sc. degree in Chemistry from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada in 2000. She then moved to the University of California, Berkeley where she completed her Ph.D. degree in 2004 working under the guidance of Jean Fréchet. After postdoctoral work at the University of Bordeaux with Ivan Huc, she joined Western in 2006. Her team’s research interests are in the development of new functional and biodegradable polymers, stimuli-responsive polymers, phosphorus-containing polymers, and polymer assemblies as well as their application to various areas including drug delivery, regenerative medicine, medical imaging, and the replacement of non-degradable plastics/polymers. She has received a number of awards including an E. W. R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from NSERC, and membership in Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.

Edward Noble Kramer Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Materials
& Warren G. and Katherine S. Schlinger Department Chair of Chemical Engineering
University of California, Santa Barbara

From 2004-2014, Segalman was a Professor of Chemical Engineering at UC Berkeley and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories where she was also the Division Director for Materials Science. In 2014, she moved to UC Santa Barbara to be the Kramer Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials and became Department Chair of Chemical Engineering in 2015. In 2018 she also became the Associate Director of the UT/UCSB/LBL EFRC: Center for Materials for Water and Energy Systems. She is the co-editor of the Annual Reviews of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and an associate editor of ACS Macro Letters. Among other awards, Segalman received the E.O. Lawrence Prize from the Department of Energy, the Andy Acrivos Award for Professional Progress from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Journal of Polymer Science Innovation Award, and the Dillon Medal from the American Physical Society. She is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Segalman is a founding organizer of the National ChemE Seminar Series featuring future faculty and the diversity of the discipline, in the elected Chair-line for the Division of Polymer Physics in the American Physical Society, on the DOE Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC), a co-author of the recent National Academies study, “Chemical Engineering: Challenges and Opportunities in the 21st Century, and a former member of the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society.

Segalman’s research involves controlling the hierarchical structure and thermodynamics of energy-relevant polymers including polyelectrolytes and semiconducting and bioinspired polymers. This includes a desire to understand the molecular-scale design rules and synthesis that lead to self-assembly and mesoscale architectures that then control macroscopic properties such as ionic, thermal and electronic conductivity as well as surface activity. Applications of relevance include battery electrolytes and binders, semiconducting polymer devices, separation membranes, and bioinspired polymers for applications ranging from marine anti-fouling coatings to next-generation photoresists. She holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas (1998), a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara (2002), and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France in 2003.

Prof. Kristofer Thurecht is Deputy Director of Research and senior group leader in the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology and Centre for Advanced Imaging at The University of Queensland. His research focusses on developing an improved understanding of the nano-bio interface, using molecular imaging to address how polymeric materials behave in complex biological environments. In this way, his team works across the boundaries of polymer chemistry and materials, biology and imaging science to probe how polymer material properties affect their function in living animals. Recently, Prof. Thurecht has applied this knowledge to build a strong research program around radiopharmaceuticals, establishing the Australian alpha particle facility for development of novel theranostics. He is Director of the ARC Research Hub for Advanced Manufacture of Targeted Radiopharmaceuticals (AMTAR) and Theme Leader within the ARC Training Centre for Innovation in Biomedical Imaging Technologies (CIBIT).

Sustainable Polymer Chemistry (SPC), Department of Molecules and Materials, Faculty of Science and Technology, MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Twente, Drienerlolaan 5, 7522 NB Enschede, The Netherlands. f.r.wurm@utwente.nl, https://www.utwente.nl/en/tnw/spc/ , @FrederikWurm

Frederik Wurm leads the Sustainable Polymer Chemistry Group at the University of Twente (Enschede, NL) and acts as an Editor for the “European Polymer Journal”. The broad research interests of Frederik Wurm cover the molecular design and development for new synthetic strategies of novel polymeric materials and focus in recent years on the synthesis of novel biodegradable polymers and the modification and formulation of biopolymers. The SPC group designs materials with molecular defined functions for degradable polymers and nanocarriers for agricultural or biomedical applications, with a special interest in phosphorus-based polymers and lignin. Frederik received his Ph.D. in 2009 (JGU, Mainz, D). After a two-year stay at EPFL (CH) as a Humboldt fellow, he joined the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Mainz, D) and finished his habilitation in Macromolecular Chemistry in 2016. In 2020, he was appointed as a full professor at UT. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and his research was awarded several times.