简介
João A. P. Coutinho is Full Professor at the Chemistry Department of University of Aveiro, Portugal where he is the director of CICECO - Aveiro Institute of Materials, one of the leading European Laboratories in Materials Science.
He graduated in Chemical Engineering at University of Porto, Portugal and further studied Thermodynamics and Petroleum Technology at Technical University of Denmark where he got his PhD in Chemical Engineering in 1995 and was then for a while a researcher at IFP, France.
The Research Team he coordinates, Path (https://path.web.ua.pt/), operates in the fields of biorefinery, green chemistry, eco-solvents development, and sustainable process design. The team comprises now 5 permanent members, 15 researchers, 30 PhD students and 15 MSc students, plus a variable number of project grant holders and foreign visitors. The PATH group publishes more than 60 articles/year that attract close to 5000 citations. To commercialize the novel technologies developed he has created, along with Dr. Mara Freire, RyaPurTech (https://ryapurtech.com/) from which he is currently the CSO.
He has filled 20 patents and published more than 850 scientific articles in international scientific journals with more than 45000 citations, and presented more than 2000 communications on technical and scientific conferences. His Scopus h-factor is 100+. He has supervised 50 MSc students, 60 PhD students and 35 Post-Doctoral Fellows and Junior Researchers that are currently working all over the world from East Timor, Algeria, Oman and India, to Brazil, England, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, in Academia, Industry and Consulting.
He coordinates and participates in several national and European research projects and has ongoing collaborations with Australia, India, Japan, UAE, Brazil, USA, Canada, and most European countries. A part of his research is funded by national and international companies.
His research has been focused on the biorefinery, in particular on the study of novel solvents for the extraction of valuable compounds present in the residual biomass from the pulp and paper and food industries, the recycling of specialty chemicals from processed foods or drugs past their shelf life, or the recycling of electronic wastes.
For these applications he has been interested in exploring ionic liquids (IL), deep eutectic solvents (DES) and novel oxygenated eco-solvents. In all cases he strives at developing a fundamental understanding of their physic-chemical characterization and the mechanisms of action, aiming at designing novel ILs and DES that are more biocompatible, and biodegradable, less toxic, and produced, if possible, from renewable sources. To minimize their use he also focuses on the use of aqueous solutions instead of pure solvents. For this purpose his group has been extensively developing aqueous two-phase systems, where aqueous solutions of hydrophilic, water soluble, DES and ILs are combined with aqueous salt solutions to create biphasic systems that have been successfully used for the purification of biomolecules. They also identified the hydrotropy in aqueous solutions of DES and ILs that allows aqueous solutions of ILs to be better solvents than pure water or pure DES. This explained the extraordinary results obtained with aqueous solutions of ILs in the extraction of compounds from biomass and allowed the development of novel DES for lignin and hemicellulose dissolution that lead to a novel wood pulping process in much milder conditions than those currently used.
He is a recurrent author of the most prestigious scientific journals with an extensive collaboration in Green Chemistry and ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, with important reviews on Chemical Reviews and Chemical Society Reviews.
