9.30. Welcome and introduction
Andrea Lazzeri
9.40. Bela Pukanszky, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Physical Aging of Poly(lactic acid)
10.30. Mikael Hedenqvist, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Protein plastics - microplastic-free alternatives
Bio
Béla Pukánszky graduated from the technical University of Budapest (Hungary) in chemical engineering, where he also received his PhD in 1976. From 1973 to 1978 he worked as a researcher at the Industrial Research Institute for Organic Chemistry (Hungary) and from 1978 he joined the Central Research Institute for Chemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) as an assistant scientific co-worker, latter scientific co-worker and finally as the head of a Department. In 1993, he was invited to the Technical University of Budapest where he became the head of the Department of Plastics and Rubber Technology. Latter the Department was merged with the Department of Physical Chemistry to create the Department of Physical Chemistry and Materials Science and he was the head of the merged unit for more than 20 years. He is still employed also at the research institute of HAS. He has produced more than 340 scientific publications, book chapters and several patents. His papers have been cited more than 10000 times and he has an h index of 56. Prof. Pukánszky is the member of numerous committees, is on the editorial panels of several scientific journals, and he is the full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He organized several international conferences with great success in the past; including the International Conference on Bio-based Polymers and Composites series. He has many industrial contacts, and has been consulting international and Hungarian companies like Borealis, General Electric, Clariant, TVK, etc.
Mikael Hedenqvist, is Professor since 2006 (PhD in 1995) and heads the Polymeric Materials Division at KTH. He works on synthetic and biobased polymers (proteins, polysaccharides, polyesters) on topics such as processing of polymers, long-term properties and mass transport, electric and mechanical properties of polymers, foams and composites (experiments and simulations/modelling). He is editor-in-chief of Polymer Testing (Elsevier) and has co-authored 350 peer-review papers and 9 book chapters. He has co-authored the textbooks Fundamental Polymer Science, U. W. Gedde, M. S. Hedenqvist, 2nd Ed., Springer-Nature, Berlin, 2019 (36000 accesses) and Applied Polymer Science, U. W. Gedde, M. S. Hedenqvist, M. Hakkarainen, F. Nilsson, O. Das, Springer-Nature, Berlin, 2021 (14000 accesses). He has written 5 course compendia and teaches in courses on e.g. Materials Mechanical Properties, Transport Properties of Polymers and Polymer Engineering. MH has supervised 24 PhD and co-supervised 22 PhD students and has been faculty opponent/external examiner 19 times. He is board member of the Nordic Bioplastic Association and a Swedish part in BON Europe (European Bioplastics). MH has been part of an invention-based company (Altereco Pak AB) and was co-founder of the company Peepoople AB. He holds 6 patent and have filed 4 patent applications and has been product and technical advisor to the company iFoodbag AB. MH commercialized a computer program (written by former PhD student Fritiof Nilsson) for solubility and diffusivity estimations of polymers, which was sold to a UK based company. MH has been a visiting researcher at CSIC (Madrid), University of Utah (Salt Lake City), ETH (Zürich), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and a visiting Professor at Institut Jozef Stefan (Slovenia) and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (France).
