Two CatchBio researchers promoted to assistant professor

Dr. Stefania Grecea and Dr. Evgeny Pidko, both from a CatchBio project, have been appointed as assistant professor.

Dr. Stefania Grecea
Dr. Stefania Grecea has been appointed to a permanent position as Assistant Professor in the Van 't Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. She joined the Heterogeneous Catalysis and Sustainable Chemistry group of Prof. Dr. Gadi Rothenberg in 2009 as part of the group's CatchBio project.
Grecea has received her PhD from the University of Bucharest in 2002. She is an expert in inorganic spectroscopy and is currently developing a range of new hybrid porous materials for a variety of applications. In 2005 she received the NWO Veni fellowship for developing d-f magneto-optical materials in Leiden University. The appointment of Stefania Grecea as assistant professor of heterogeneous catalysis and sustainable chemistry will strengthen the group in the areas of catalyst characterisation and materials science, complementing the existing expertise in catalyst discovery and optimisation. Grecea held a postdoc position in CatchBio project Catalytic valorisation of lignin to key phenols and aromatics, a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and Wageningen UR.

Dr. Evgeny Pidko
Dr. Evgeny Pidko has been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Sustainable Energy Technologies in the Inorganic Materials Chemistry group in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and in the Institute for Complex Molecular Sytems at TU/e.
His research activities primarily lie in the field of heterogeneous catalysis with the main focus on catalytic processes for sustainable energy technologies, namely catalytic conversion of biomass and carbon dioxide. His research is directed toward the understanding of catalytic reactivity at the molecular level and utilizing this knowledge to rationally design heterogeneous catalysts. Pidko held a postdoc position in CatchBio project Physical chemistry of catalytic sugar conversion (in the group of Prof. Dr. Emiel Hensen).