Jeroen Lauwaert is an assistant professor in sustainable industrial chemistry at the Industrial Catalysis and Adsorption Technology research group of Ghent University, since September 2021. He started his doctoral research, on the design of cooperative acid-base catalysts for aldol reactions, at the Laboratory for Chemical Technology (LCT) in collaboration with the Center for Ordered Materials, Organometallics and Catalysis (COMOC) at the same university, in 2011. In 2014, he gained international experience while working in the group of prof. Jones in Atlanta, USA. Following the completion of his PhD in 2015, he joined Ghent University’s Industrial Catalysis and Adsorption Technology (INCAT) research group as a postdoctoral assistant. In 2017 and 2020, his expertise in the broad field of chemical engineering, ranging from heterogenous catalysis and reaction engineering to thermodynamics and separation train design, was honored by FWO (Research Foundation – Flanders) with, respectively, a junior and a senior postdoctoral fellowship. In 2021, he was appointed as part-time (50%) assistant professor.
Today, prof. Lauwaert supervises 10 young researchers who primarily focus on process intensification for applications spanning from biomass valorisation to fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries. His research activities comprise a wide spectrum of fields.
One of the major themes is heterogeneous catalysis and reaction engineering, which involves synthesizing and characterizing catalysts and testing their performance in terms of activity, selectivity, and stability. Additionally, he develops intrinsic kinetic and industrial reactor models to optimize reaction conditions and design catalysts.
Secondly, prof. Lauwaert has expertise in adsorption technologies for the recovery of high value components that are present in low concentrations in waste streams. Furthermore, he aims to unravel the thermodynamics of molecules containing multiple functionalities and/or heteroatoms by developing thermodynamic models that can be applied to separation train design. Finally, a minor research topic of prof. Lauwaert aims at developing multidimensional chromatographic analysis techniques (liquid and gas) for complex mixtures, e.g., non-volatile aromatics.
