Conference Description
The quest for sustainable resources to meet the demands of a rapidly rising global population, while mitigating risks of increasing CO2 emissions and associated climate change, represents a grand challenge for humanity. Biomass offers the most readily implementable solution to non-petroleum organic molecules for the manufacture of bulk, fine and specialty chemicals, polymers and transportation fuels. Biomass feedstocks vary widely and include lignocellulosics, other carbohydrates, proteins, other plant-derived molecules, aquatic sources and more. Biorefineries are an integral component to the transformation of the chemical industry from petroleum refineries to biobased chemical manufacturing. This GRC will look at overcoming fundamental challenges towards the development of individual biomass process streams that contain primary biomass components and the effective integration of these streams.
This GRC is organized to integrate the following science and engineering activities that will enable a transformation to the manufacturing of chemicals and materials from biomass: i) “front end” strategies to deconstruct or fractionate lignocellulose into individual biomass components, ii) increasing the selectivity and efficiency of chemical and biological catalysts for biomass conversion technologies, iii) selective lignin conversions that provide narrow compositional ranges of aromatic building blocks; iv) genetic engineer of plants to increase their susceptibility to deconstruction methods and as factories to produce natural and non-natural chemicals; v) programing increasingly effective microbes (synthetic biology) that convert complex feedstocks to nearly homogenous products.
The topics, speakers, and discussion leaders for the conference sessions are displayed below. The conference chair is currently developing their detailed program, which will include the complete meeting schedule, as well as the talk titles for all speakers. The detailed program will be available by March 14, 2019. Please check back for updates.
Biorefinery and Bioeconomy Concepts
Discussion Leaders
-
Madeleine Bussemaker (University of Surrey, United Kingdom)
Speakers
-
Blake Simmons (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA)
-
Arthur Ragauskas (University of Tennessee, USA)
Biorefinery Processes
Discussion Leaders
-
Sonja Salmon (North Carolina State University, USA)
Speakers
-
Maureen McCann (Purdue University, USA)
-
Robin Rogers (The University of Alabama, USA)
-
Nathan Mosier (Purdue University, USA)
Lignin Valorization
Discussion Leaders
-
Seema Singh (Sandia National Laboratories, USA)
Speakers
-
Kristina Hilden (University of Helsinki, Finland)
-
Yuriy Román (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
Carbohydrates Valorization
Discussion Leaders
-
Brent Shanks (Iowa State University, USA)
Speakers
-
Paul Dauenhauer (University of Minnesota, USA)
-
Michel Gagne (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
-
Emily Cranston (McMaster University, Canada)
Downstream Processing and Process Intensification
Discussion Leaders
-
Christina Payne (National Science Foundation, USA)
Speakers
-
Basudeb Saha (University of Delaware, USA)
-
Anne Meyer (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark)
Liquid Phase and Heterogeneous Catalysts for Biomass Conversion
Discussion Leaders
-
Richard Gross (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)
Speakers
-
Graham Hutchings (Cardiff University, United Kingdom)
-
Robert Kelly (North Carolina State University, USA)
-
Susannah Scott (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Whole Cell and Plant Based Chemical/Material Production Platforms
Discussion Leaders
-
Michael Bott (Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany)
Speakers
-
Katrina Cornish (Ohio State University, USA)
-
Gregg Beckham (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA)
Sustainable Polymers/Materials from Biomass
Discussion Leaders
-
Huai Cheng (U.S. Department of Agriculture, USA)
Speakers
-
Charlotte Williams (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)
-
Amar Mohanty (University of Guelph, Canada)
-
Eugene Chen (Colorado State University, USA)
Biomass Derived Interfacial Chemicals
Discussion Leaders
-
Ibrahim Banat (University of Ulster, United Kingdom)
Speakers
-
Inge Bogaert (Ghent University, Belgium)
-
George John (The City College of New York, USA)
