Category: Team

Thomas De Beer graduated in pharmaceutical sciences in 2002 at the Ghent University in Belgium. He obtained his PhD at the same university in 2007. For his PhD research, he examined the suitability of Raman spectroscopy as a Process Analytical Technology tool for pharmaceutical production processes. Within his PhD research period, he worked four months at University of Copenhagen in Denmark, Department of Pharmaceutics and Analytical Chemistry (Prof. Jukka Rantanen). After his PhD, he was an FWO funded post-doctoral fellow at the Ghent University (2007-2010). Within his post-doc mandate, he worked 9 months at the Department of Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Technology and Biopharmaceutics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany (Prof. Winter and Prof. Frieβ). In February 2010, he became professor in Process Analytics & Technology at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences from the university of Ghent. His research goals include bringing innovation pharmaceutical production processes (freeze-drying, hot-melt extrusion, continuous from-powder-to-tablet processing etc.). More specifically, Prof. De Beer contributes to the development of continuous manufacturing processes for drug products such as solids, semi-solids, liquids and biologicals (continuous freeze-drying of unit doses). Thomas De Beer is also director of Ghent University’s Center of Excellence in Sustainable Pharmaceutical Engineering (CESPE) which is founded in 2016.

Chris Vervaet is a pharmacist and obtained his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Ghent University in 1997. After a post-doc in the Aerosol Research Group at the Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, Virginia, US) he was appointed in 2000 as professor at the Department of Pharmaceutics (Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Ghent University). Since 2013 he is chair of the Department of Pharmaceutics, and since 2015 he is director of the Laboratory of Pharmaceutical technology. His research focuses on drug delivery, more specifically on the development of innovative solid dosage forms for oral applications. His fields of expertise are drug compounding, pharmaceutical technology, sustained drug release, continuous manufacturing, granulation/tableting, hot-melt extrusion and extrusion/spheronisation. His research intensively collaborates with equipment manufacturers as well as pharmaceutical companies for the introduction of continuous manufacturing within the pharmaceutical industry, e.g. continuous wet granulation, continuous feeding/blending, continuous freeze drying. The department is affiliated with several international research clusters, e.g. the Pharmaceutical Solid State Research Cluster (with partners from Helsinki, Lille, Leuven, Dusseldorf, Cambridge, Graz, Otago, Lisbon, Ljubljana and Copenhagen) and the Interreg IMODE cluster (with members of Lille, East Anglia, London, Greenwich and Cambridge). He has supervised 38 PhD students (since 2000), published about 260 internationally peer reviewed articles and 8 books chapters, and has filed 19 patent applications. He is member of the board of the Belgian Society of Pharmaceutical Sciences (since 2013), and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Drug Delivery Science and Technology and the International Journal of Pharmaceutics.

Valérie Vanhoorne graduated in 2011 with great distinction as a pharmacist (Master of Science in Drug Development) from Ghent University (UGent) and started her PhD under supervision of Prof. Jean-Paul Remon and Prof. Chris Vervaet in the Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Technology (UGent). In 2016, she obtained her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences studying continuous agglomeration technologies. She continued working in the lab as a postdoctoral researcher focusing on innovative manufacturing processes for oral solid dosage forms. Initially, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in close collaboration with Janssen Pharmaceutica (Belgium) on the development of predictive empirical models for continuous direct compression and platform formulations for continuous twin screw granulation. Later on, as doctor-assistant, she also worked on patient-tailored dosage forms and performed a research stay at the University of Düsseldorf working on roller compaction. Her current research line will focus on formulation and process development of continuous manufacturing processes and on personalization of dosage forms (via 3D-printing and multi-particulate dosage forms) to meet the needs of specific patient populations.

Prof. dr. ir. Ashish Kumar has been working in the field of Pharmaceuticals and biologics development since 2007 in both academic and industrial set-up. Before joining Ghent University, he worked as a Senior Process Engineer at the drug product development division of Janssen Pharmaceutica, Belgium. He obtained his Ph.D. from Ghent University in 2015, for research on the experimental and model-based analysis of twin-screw wet granulation for continuous solid-dosage manufacturing in pharmaceutical production. Before, he obtained a Professional Doctorate in Engineering as a Designer in Bioprocess Engineering from the Technical University of Delft in 2011, and worked for Janssen Pharmaceutica, in Leiden, The Netherlands and Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories in India. His research interests lie in the area of developing insights regarding constitutive mechanisms of various pharmaceutical processes by combining experimental and mechanistic modeling frameworks to provide innovative solutions. The Pharma Eng research group he leads focuses on the model-based design of pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical manufacturing equipment and processes for innovative drug products.

Prof. Dr. Ir. Christian V. Stevens (°1965) is professor at the Department of Green Chemistry and Technology at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering (Ghent University). He graduated at the same department as bio-engineer in chemistry in 1988 and obtainded a PhD in 1992 as fellow of the National Fund for Scientific Research. During his PhD he also worked as a research assistant of the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, USA with Prof. C.E. McKenna.
After his PhD at Ghent University under the direction of Prof. N. De Kimpe, he did post-doctoral work at the Center for Heterocyclic Compounds at the University of Florida, USA under the direction of Prof. A. R. Katritzky as a NATO Research Fellow. He became group leader in the group of Prof. Katritzky in 1993. He returned as a postdoctoral fellow of the National Fund for Scientific Research. In 1994, he also made a short postdoctoral stay at the University of Alicante (Spain) under the direction of Prof. M. Yus.
In 1995, he became group leader of the National Fund for Scientific Research and became guest professor in 1997 at Ghent University. In 2000, he became professor at the current Faculty of Bioscience Engineering and developed the research group SynBioC of which he is the director. Since 2014, he is senior full professor.
His major research topics are:

• Heterocyclic Synthesis
• Microreactor Technology
• Chemical modification of Renewable Resources

Jo Dewulf is full professor at Ghent University, Department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology. He holds a Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. in Bioscience Engineering. He focuses on resource consumption and efficiency analysis, relying mainly on thermodynamic principles and life cycle thinking. He makes thorough analyses at the process, plant and overall industrial system level, based on life cycle thinking and thermodynamic principles in order to find out opportunities for improvement (techniques: Exergy Analysis: EA; (Exergetic )Life Cycle Analysis: (E)LCA). Apart from methodological improvements, implementations and collaborations with industrial partners have been put in practice in three areas: fine chemicals and pharma, agro/bio/food, and secondary and primary raw materials. For his work, he obtained the prize of the Laureate of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium in 2008. During 2013-2015, he worked as senior scientist at the European Commissions’ Joint Research Centre on the sustainable use of natural resources including resource efficiency, criticality, supply resilience, etc. His work is visible on the international scene, with more than 230 papers in international peer reviewed journals included in the Web of Science (Science Citation Index Expanded only), with about 6000 citations and an h-index of 42. He assisted to several international conference organisations and international journals, e.g. serving at the RCR editorial board.

Delphine De Smedt, PhD, has a master in biomedical sciences (2006) a master in business economics (2007) an a PhD in medical sciences (2014). She started her professional career as attaché at the RIZIV/INAMI (Dienst voor geneeskundige verzorging/Le Service des soins de santé). Since august 2008, she has been working at the Ghent University, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, first as junior researcher and PhD student, later as FWO post-doctoral fellow and since 2017, as assistant professor. In January 2014, she obtained her PhD entitled ‘Health-related quality of life and psychological distress in patients with coronary heart disease’ for which she was nominated as Laureate faculty doctoral price 2013-2014.

Delphine De Smedt is experienced in health economics and epidemiology. Her main research interest are related to health-related quality of life, disease burden, disease modelling and health economic evaluations. Delphine De Smedt is national coordinator of the EUROASPIRE survey, which has the aim to assess whether the guidelines on cardiovascular prevention are being follow in clinical practice. Within this European project, she acts as principal investigator for the EUROASPIRE health economics project. Furthermore, she is the main supervisor of the QAPICHE study, which has the aim to investigate the health-related quality of life in adults with chronic diseases. Furthermore, she is activily involved in the research activities of the European Society of Cardiology.

Delphine De Smedt has extensive experience in measuring patients reported outcomes, and in cost-effectiveness analysis. She has published over 45 publications, and has an H-index=16 (ISI).

Catherine S. J. Cazin received her MSc from the Université Montpellier II in 1999 and her PhD from the University of Exeter where she worked under the supervision of Robin B. Bedford on Pd-based catalytic systems. Catherine carried out a postdoctoral stay at the Universität des Saarlandes with Michael Veith and one at the Institut Français du Pétrole with Hélène Olivier-Bourbigou. She then obtained a position as Chargée de Recherche at the CNRS. She joined the EaStCHEM School of Chemistry of St Andrews in 2009 where she held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship from 2011 until 2016. She then joined the Department of Chemistry of Ghent University as a full professor. Her research interests lie in the development of sustainable synthesis through mechanochemistry (synthetic and catalytic), electrochemistry, and the design of high activity transition metal catalysts for fine chemical synthesis.

Prof. Dr. Ludwig Cardon became Mechanical Engineer in 1988 and joined the University College of Ghent, Belgium since 1990. He received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering in 2006 from the Birmingham City University, UK. Since 2006, he is the head of the Centre for Polymer & Material Technologies CPMT and professor at the faculty of Applied Engineering Sciences of the University College of Ghent. He is co-founder of the rapid prototyping research group (RPT), now integrated in CPMT. His actual research interests mainly include high-tech polymer technology/processing and RPT for several applications such as technical parts, biobased polymers, micro moulding, bioengineering and biomedical applications.

Dieter Deforce received his MSc Degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1994 from the University of Ghent, Belgium. In 1999 he received his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the same university. In 1999 he was awarded a Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) fellowship for his post‐doctoral research in the University of California, San Diego, USA. In 2000 he was appointed a FWO (Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders) postdoctoral research fellowship.

Dieter Deforce became a professor at the University of Ghent in 2001; he was appointed as head of the Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences. From 2001 until 2016 he was also head of the forensic DNA‐analysis laboratory, which he founded at the University of Ghent, accredited and recognized by the Belgian government. He remains in the forensic field as a dedicated DNA expert.

He is chair of the Belgian Medicines Committee, member of the Scientific Advise Working Party of the European Medicines Agency. He is also the director of the ProGenTomics platform of the University of Ghent, providing, amongst others, proteomics- and mainly mass spectrometry- based protein analytical tools to the research community. He is a partner in NXT‐GNT, a research consortium providing the research community next generation DNA‐sequencing. He is member of the board of directors of the VIB.

His research focuses on applying proteomics and genomics platforms (including Next Generation Sequencing) in the field of post translational protein modifications, stem cell development, prenatal genetic diagnosis, (auto‐)immunity and forensics and he is (co‐)author of over 350 scientific papers.

Stefaan C. De Smedt  (°1967) studied pharmacy at Ghent University (Belgium) and received his MS degree in pharmaceutical sciences in 1990. He graduated from Ghent University in 1995. In 1995 he joined the pharmaceutical development group of Janssen Research Foundation. Since 1997 he has been a post-doctoral fellow of the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research at the Departments of Pharmacy of respectively Ghent University and the University of Utrecht (the Netherlands). In October 1999 he became Professor in Physical Pharmacy and Biopharmacy at Ghent University where he founded the Ghent Research Group on Nanomedicines. In 2007 Stefaan C. De Smedt was Guest Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and from 2012 till 2014 he was appointed Guest Professor at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). Currently he is Guest Professor at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2016-2019), Distinguished Visiting Scientist of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China (Hefei; 2017), and Specially Appointed Professor of Nanjing Foresty University (2016-2018).  He served as dean of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Ghent University from 2010 till 2014. Since 2014 he is a member of the Board of Directors of Ghent University. Since 2004 Dr. De Smedt serves as the European Associate Editor of the Journal of Controlled Release (JCR), being a leading journal in Pharmacology & Pharmacy; In 2015 he became Editor of JCR (for the region Europe- the Middle East & Africa). In 2015 he has been elected as member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine. In 2017 he joined the board of CRIG (cancer research institute Ghent). Dr. Stefaan De Smedt filed 15 patents on carriers (and adjuvants) for drug delivery, and materials (and methods) for diagnostics.  He is a scientific founder of Memobead Technologies, a spin-off from Ghent University, whose technology was further developed by Biocartis in Lausanne (Swiss) and Mechelen (Belgium). Currently MyCartis (Ghent) commercializes the technology. Dr. De Smedt is a member of the Drug Delivery Advisory Panel of Santen (Japan) specialized in ophthalmological medicines.

Richard Hoogenboom (1978) studied chemical engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands). In 2005, he obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Ulrich S. Schubert and continued working as a project leader for the Dutch Polymer Institute. After postdoctoral training with Martin Moeller and 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 interests include stimuli-responsive polymers, supramolecular polymers, and poly(2-oxazoline)s. He has published > 400 scientific articles and is currently editor-in-chief for European Polymer Journal and associate editor for Australian Journal of Chemistry. Prof. Hoogenboom is the recipient of the inaugural Polymer Chemistry Lectureship (2015), the fifth PI IUPAC award (2016) and the ACS Macromolecules/Biomacromolecules young investigator award (2017).

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.

Prof. Dr. ir. Clara Mihaela Ionescu is docent at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Dynamical Systems and Control research laboratory. She has 15 years expertise in process control, both in basic and advanced control strategies applied to chemical processes and manufacturing plants. Her know-how varies from fundamental control algorithms to hands on control tuning for non-control-specialised process operators. Her interests are in the pragmatic development of tools from control engineering area to the deployment thereof at the core of the production units. Specific challenges addressed in the past included: variable time delays, plant mismatch, multiple objective optimization in real time (with priorities) and sub-process interaction (train of process subunits). Specific control methodologies include: PID type, robust compensators design, predictive control and automatic tuning based on changes in operating point or product specification. She has an h-index of 22 in Web of Science with about 100 peer reviewed published articles. 

Steven P. Nolan was born in Québec City.  He obtained his B.Sc. from the University of West Florida in 1983 before moving to the University of Miami to work with Prof. Carl Hoff on the thermochemistry of organometallic compounds. After a postdoctoral stay with Prof. Tobin J. Marks at Northwestern University, he joined the University of New Orleans in 1990 rapidly raising to the rank of University Research Professor in 1999. In 2006 he joined the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ). In early 2009, he moved to the School of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and in 2017 moved to his present position in the Department of Chemistry of Ghent University as Senior Full Professor.

Professor Nolan’s work has been recognised with numerous awards such as the recent A. C. Cope Scholar award from the ACS (2023) along with various other recognitions such an an ERC advanced grant and election to learned Societies. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the European Academy of Sciences.

Steve has published 3 monographs and over 680 research papers. His work has a H-index of 120.

Professor Nolan’s research interests revolve around the design and synthesis of catalytic complexes enabling organic transformations.

Joris W. Thybaut (°1975, Ghent Belgium) is full professor in catalytic reaction engineering at the Laboratory for Chemical Technology at Ghent University since October 2014. He obtained his master’s degree in chemical engineering in 1998 at the same university, where he continued his PhD studies on single-event microkinetic (SEMK) modeling of hydrocracking and hydrogenation. In 2003 he went to the ‘Institut des Recherches sur la Catalyse’ in Lyon, France, for a postdoc on high throughput experimentation, before being appointed in 2005 at Ghent University.

Today, prof. Thybaut is heading the Catalytic Reaction Engineering (CaRE) research group, comprising about 15 junior researchers and post-docs, within the Laboratory for Chemical Technology at Ghent University. Prof. Thybaut and his group actively investigate a variety of large-scale industrial reactions and more particularly, the rational design of the corresponding catalysts as well as of the reactors in which the corresponding reactions are exploited. Ideal gas phase reactions as well as strongly non-ideal liquid phase reactions are addressed. Research projects range from bilateral contracts with industry up to government funded large scale integrated projects. Prof. Thybaut holds an ERC consolidator grant to innovate the SEMK methodology and use it in the framework of renewable, oxygen containing feeds. More recently, as part of bilateral collaborations the scope of the investigated chemistry is further being extended towards inorganic reactions. Major efforts also go into VOC elimination using various oxidizing agents and conditions.

In 2018, Jan Verwaeren became associate professor at Ghent University and member of the research unit on Knowledge-based systems (KERMIT, https://kermit.ugent.be/). As a computer scientist, his research interests lies on the crossroads between machine learning, mathematical optimization and image processing. His expertise include methodological and algorithmic development as well as applied research in these areas.

From a methodological point of view, he likes to combine novel insights from the fields of convex and discrete optimization to develop new data analysis strategies for solving predictive modelling, data-reduction and image processing problems. From an application point of view, through collaborations with research units and companies in pharmaceutical engineering, he is currently active in model driven experimental design (active learning) for pharmaceutical product formulation and model-driven predictive maintenance in pharmaceutical production facilities. In the (broader) field of applied biological sciences, he works on projects related to the use of image processing techniques for plant phenotyping, food processing and precision livestock farming.

Prof. dr. Paul Van Liedekerke is assistent professor at Ghent University. He holds a MSC in physics (University of Ghent), a PhD in bio-engineering (KULeuven) and a Habilitation from Sorbonne University, Paris.

Paul has worked at KULeuven (2001-2011) where has developed Discrete Element Methods to simulate granular flows in machinery, as well as Computation Fluids dynamics methods to simulate complex fluids.  From 2012 to 2022 he worked at INRIA de Paris as expert engineer where he created models and software to predict cellular growth (in vitro and in-vivo)  and living tissue development. During these years he collaborated with industrial partners on several occasions.

His interests and expertise lie in developing numerical models and new conceptual ideas such as hybrid modelling and digital twins, and applying those techniques in industry and medicine.  In a nutshell: simulations of granular flow and powders, simulations of cell growth and living tissues, simulations of bioreactors: cell yield and biologics, and software development.

Kevin Van Geem (full professor) is member of the Laboratory for Chemical Technology of Ghent University and director of the Center for Sustainable Chemistry. Thermochemical reaction engineering in general and in particular the transition from fossil to renewable resources are his main research interests. He is a former Fulbright Research Scholar of MIT, visiting professor of Stanford and coordinates the experiments on more than a dozen pilot plant an d bench scale units. He is the author of more than two hundred scientific publications and has recently started his own spin-off company. He is involved in on-line and off-line analysis of complex petrochemical and biochemical samples using comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography. Artificial intelligence, first principle model development, scale-up, and process intensification belong to his main expertise. He is currently the coordinator of 3 different large-scale projects: IMPROOF (SPIRE H2020, Scientific coordinator 2016-2020), OPTIMA (ERC consolidator, Scientific coordinator, 2019-2024), WATCH (Catalisti, Scientific coordinator 2019-2023).