Dr. Mike Ladisch
Distinguished Professor and Director
Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering
Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering
Purdue University

Bio: Michael R. Ladisch is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering at Purdue University.  He was Chief Technology Officer at Mascoma Corporation from 2007 to 2013.  His BS (Drexel University), MS and PhD (Purdue University) are in Chemical Engineering.  He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and Fellow of AIMBE, AIChE, ACS, AAAS and the National Academy of Inventors. He serves on committees of the National Academies and on the Board of the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research.  He has received the highest honor that Purdue University confers onto a faculty member, the Morrill Award.  The aims of Ladisch’s research and teaching are to discover and disseminate new knowledge on proteins at interfaces that will advance the translational science for injectable medicines, pathogen detection, bioseparations engineering, and transformation of renewable resources into biofuels and bioproducts. His goal is to provide an academic environment that enables a rigorous education in biological engineering while catalyzing development of leadership qualities for a diverse cross-section of students and scholars.
 

Abstract: Bioproduct Engineering
Bioproducts are defined by their feedstocks, their function and the manner in which they are manufactured.  Given the importance of decarbonization in mitigating effects of on-going climate change, renewable lignocellulosic (non-food biomass) resources represent preferred feedstocks since they incorporate and sequester atmospheric CO2 in the form of lignin, cellulose, and hemicellulose at a gigaton scale.  Hence, their conversion into transportation biofuels and bioproducts represents a pathway to decarbonization if bioconversion is carried out at large-scale.  This requires liquefaction of solid lignocellulosic feedstocks, efficient enzyme hydrolysis and fermentation and multi-scale engineering of bioprocesses, i.e., the engineering of bioproducts.  Engineering starts at a molecular level and culminates in predictive modeling of unit operations and process synthesis, accompanied by techno-economic assessment (TEA) and life cycle analysis (LCA) of the overall integrated process.  LCA is a critical accounting tool that provides an auditable framework for quantitating net carbon reduction in the context of a circular economy.  This seminar will give an analysis of principles of bioproduct engineering and criteria for scalability based on the current state-of-the-art of bioprocessing of corn stover and bagasse.  Liquefaction and fermentation of corn stover pellets to organic acids for formulation into cements is discussed as a pathway for sequestering gigaton quantities of CO2 in concretes used to construct built environments (roads, runways, homes, commercial buildings).