Dr. ir. Stefaan De Wildeman

B4Plastics

Coordinates R&D and product innovations

Dr. ir. Stefaan De Wildeman (male) coordinates R&D and product innovations at B4Plastics since 2015. As Biochemical Engineer (KULeuven (B), 1998), he holds a PhD (2002) in Applied Biological Sciences from UGent (B) and Friedrich-Schiller Uni Jena (D), after which he joined DSM in the positions of Associate-Senior Scientist in several corporate and business DSM projects. Since 2008, he became increasingly involved in breakthrough research involving new biobased building blocks. To speed up biobased materials innovations, he gradually started several early-TRL academic projects since then, of which peer reviewed publications and patents add up till 38 and 17 respectively. After his Post-Graduate in Business Administration in 2015 from UHasselt, he prepared B4Plastics for launching its first world-new niche products in 2017. He helped to finance the innovation activities at B4Plastics by participating in the BBI project VIPRISCAR, the EU Interreg/CrossRoads2 Project “TriggerPlastics”, and several Flemish Consortium projects such as “EnzymASE” and “BAEKELAND”. All programs focus on the introduction of new biobased building blocks into novel backbones for more ecological materials. Together with the growing team at B4Plastics, he will coordinate the synthesis and development of the new niche materials derived from BIOCOMEM on pilot scale in 2019-2021.