Dr. Katrien Bernaerts

Maastricht University

Associate Professor Biobased Materials, Polymer Chemistry

Associate Professor Dr. Katrien Bernaerts

Responsibilities: Associate Professor Biobased Materials, Polymer Chemistry. Supervision of research projects, funding acquisition, teaching, general management of a group consisting of 8 PhD’s, 1 post-doc, 1 technician and some bachelor/master students.

Experience and background: Research chemist macromolecular chemistry with a broad experience in both academia (PhD in polymer chemistry from Ghent University, Belgium) and industry (Agfa, Teijin Aramid, DSM). Main research focus is on the design of polymer materials with tunable properties and recyclability exploiting the functionality of biobased building blocks. Structure-property relationships of the obtained polymers are studied in several fields of application e.g. stimuli-responsive polymers, coatings, fibres, organic membranes, engineering plastics and biomedical materials. Growing focus on the use of artificial intelligence techniques to support the experimental work, e.g. data interpretation and prediction of structure-property relationships.