Nídia Dana Lourenço, PhD

    Nídia Dana Lourenço is a Senior Resercher in Environmental Biotechnology and Bioengineering at BIOENG-UCIBIO, Department of Chemistry, NOVA School of Science and Technology, Caparica. She is a Chemical Engineer (5-years, minor in Biotechnology) and a PhD in Biotechnology, both by Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and before joining BIOENG-UCIBIO (2018), she was a Reserch Scientist at the Quality Control Sector of the AtralCipan Pharmaceutical Group (2003) and a Post-Doc Fellow at iBB-IST (2003-2018) with a stay at TUDelft as Visiting Research Scientist (2013).

    In parallel to research, ND Lourenço had several teaching appointments in Environmental Biotechnology and Bioengineering: she was a Lecturer at Universidade Católica Portuguesa (2005-2008) an Invited Adjunct Professor at ESTB/Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal (2010-2011); an Invited Assistant Professor at UAlg (2011-2012); and a Collaborating Lecturer of the Department of Bioengineering at IST (2014-2018).

    ND Lourenço has expertise in industrial wastewater treatment using activated sludge and aerobic granular sludge biotechnologies assisted by real-time bioprocess monitoring based on spectroscopy and chemometrics. Her current research is focused on contributing to the shift from wastewater treatment to wastewater valorization toward a resource-efficient economy. In the past 4 years she integrated 5 EU project teams (1.83M€) with academic and industrial partners and she has been developing waste/wastewater valorization bioprocesses through polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) production using mixed microbial cultures, from lab to pilot scale. She has also been responsible for the development of real-time monitoring strategies based on near infrared (NIR) and Raman spectroscopies for the optimization of these bioprocesses.