Jo Dewulf
Jo Dewulf (°18/7/1969) works with the research group ENVOC of the department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology at Ghent University, Belgium. He focuses on resources for clean technology, relying mainly on thermodynamic principles and life cycle thinking.
After engineering studies (maxima cum laude, 1992) and PhD (maxima cum laude, 1997) at Ghent University and post-doc research both at Ghent University and the Delft University of Technology, he became assistant professor (2003), associate professor (2007) and full professor (2012) Environmental and Clean Technology at Ghent University. He was on leave for two years from his full professor position to join the European Commission – Joint Research Centre as senior scientist in the Sustainability Assessment Unit (2013-2015). For his scientific work, he obtained the prize of the laureate of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium in 2008.
In the early stages of his research, he concentrated on environmental analytical methodologies and on advanced oxidation technologies as end-of-pipe techniques. Now for more than 15 years, he heavily focuses on clean technology, i.e. searching for preventive actions within production processes themselves. To do so, 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: ELCA).
Apart from methodological improvements, implementations and collaborations with industrial partners have been put in practice, e.g. with Johnson&Johnson-Janssen Pharmaceutica, Taminco, Organic Waste Systems, Syral, Indaver, Umicore, Solvay and others. Also activities in this field with essenscia (federation of the Belgian chemical Industry) have been set up, funded by the Flemish IWT and by EU-EFRD. His team is also partner of the Flemish Policy Research Center on Sustainable Materials Management. The work continues also within the EU context, e.g. in the SPIRE project Measure, the EU KIC Raw Materials with its SSIC (Sustainability Support and Information Centre) and the Horizon 2020 project RePair. Since his involvement with the European Commission, he further concentrates on the sustainable use of natural resources, e.g. resource efficiency, resource criticality, integrated sustainability assessment, and use of secondary resources. It is in this context that the expertise of J. Dewulf, i.e. life cycle and thermodynamics based sustainability analysis at process, plant and cradle-to-gate level is of value in developing and assessing new technologies. The work has been also oriented towards southern countries, with finished and running MSc and PhD projects in collaboration with Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Kenya, Vietnam...
His work is visible on the international scene, with more than 200 papers in international peer reviewed journals included in the Web of Science, with over 4000 citations and an h-index of 37. Now in 2016, the second Wiley book he edited is published: Sustainability Assessment of Renewables-Based Products: Methods and Case Studies.
