7. Statuskonferenz in Leipzig (Foto: DBFZ)

Introducing the members of the Scientific Committee

We are proud to present to you the Scientific Committee (SC), responsible to review the scientific contributions to the IV. CMP. The SC is chaired by Dr. Jan Liebetrau, Head of Biochemical Conversion Department at the DBFZ Deutsches Biomasseforschungszentrum (DBFZ German Biomass Research Center). 

Jan Liebetrau

DBFZ | DE

Dr. Jan Liebetrau is Head of Biochemical Conversion Department at the DBFZ Deutsches Biomasseforschungszentrum (DBFZ German Biomass Research Center) in Leipzig. After obtaining a Diploma in Civil Engineering Jan Liebetrau received his PhD at the Bauhaus-University Weimar on the topic “Control System for the anaerobic treatment of organic waste”. From 2006 to 2007, he was visiting scientist at the Alberta Research Council, Canada, working on a project “Integrated Manure Utilization System” (IMUS). From 2008 to 2010 he has been group leader before he became Head of the Department Biochemical Conversion at (DBFZ). Jan Liebetrau’s main research interests are process control of AD processes, solid state fermentation and emissions from biogas plants.

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Fabian Jacobi

Hessian State Laboratory (LHL) – Landesbetrieb Hessisches Landeslabor (LHL) | DE

Fabian Jacobi studied biology at the University of Bremen and holds a doctoral degree from the agricultural faculty of the University of Kiel. He worked as a group leader in the biochemical conversion department of the DBFZ, Leipzig. The research projects he was and is involved in cover the topics NIRS- and other sensor-developments, flexible biogas-production, simulation of biogas production, substrate testing and laboratory analysis. Currently he is employed as the head of an agricultural and biogas laboratory unit of the Hessian State Laboratory.

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Sabine Kleinsteuber

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ | DE

Dr. Kleinsteuber is the head of the research group Microbiology of Anaerobic Systems that was founded in 2010 as a joint working group between the UFZ (Dept. Environmental Microbiology) and the DBFZ (Dept. Biochemical Conversion). Her research field is the microbial ecology of natural and engineered anaerobic systems, such as anaerobic digesters. Her work addresses microbial community functions as well as the carbon and energy flows in anaerobic bioreactors and aims to understand the complex metabolic interactions, to identify microbial indicators for process control, to optimize biotechnological processes and to develop novel anaerobic bioprocesses.
Dr. rer. nat. Sabine Kleinsteuber studied Biology and got her doctoral degree from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 1994. From 1995 to 1999 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Environmental Microbiology of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, and has been working there as a senior scientist since 1999.

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Jerry Murphy

University College Cork

Jerry D Murphy is the Director of the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Marine and Renewable Energy (MaREI) centre with 200 researchers, 46 industry partners and cumulative research funding of €55M. He is Chair of Civil Engineering in University College Cork. He has worked with the International Energy Agency (IEA) Bioenergy for 12 years and presently serves as Leader of Task 37 (Energy from Biogas). In this capacity, he has authored or edited several reports on the state of the art of biogas systems including the Biogas Handbook.
He has authored over 120 peer review journal papers in top international press. He is ranked amongst the most cited researchers worldwide in Civil Engineering; he has a h-index of 43 in Google Scholar and 35 in Scopus. He was awarded the Engineers Ireland Excellence Award in 2015 for best paper/presentation and accepted the award for the best research centre in the Marine in 2017.

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Hinrich Uellendahl

Flensburg University of Applied Sciences | DE (formely Aalborg University | DK)

Since 2019 Hinrich Uellendahl is Professor at the Flensburg University of Applied Sciences.

Until 2018 he was  Associate  Professor  at  the  Section  for  Sustainable  Biotechnology  at Aalborg University Copenhagen. He has been working in the research field of anaerobic digestion (AD) since 1997.
Main  focus  has  been  on  the  optimization  of  biogas  and  bioethanol  production from agricultural and municipal waste, including pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass.

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Jean-Philippe Steyer

LBE - INRA Narbonne Laboratory of Environmental Biotechnology | FRA

From 2009 to 2016 Dr. Jean-Philippe STEYER became the research director at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research of INRA (“Laboratoire de Biotechnologie de l’Environnement”) in Narbonne, France. His main research themes are modeling and control of biological processes, especially wastewater treatment processes and bioenergy production processes (anaerobic digestion, dark fermentation, microalgae etc.).
He received his Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Toulouse in 1991 and was awarded as the "best Ph.D. thesis in applied process control" in France. He then did a postdoc at the "Chemical Process Modelling and Control Research Center" of Lehigh University, USA.
During his career, he participated in the writing of 1 book, 21 book chapters, 253 scientific papers in international peer-reviewed journals and 453 in international conferences. He has been Associate Editor of two international journals (Reviews in Environmental Science and Bio/Technology and Water Research). Dr. Steyer supervised over the last 23 years 35 MSc. and 26 Ph.D. students  together with 12 postdocs (including 3 Marie-Curie postdocs). In 2013, he was the Chair of the IWA International conference on Instrumentation, Control and Automation (ICA) for water and wastewater systems (more than 200 participants) organized in Narbonne, France.

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Alastair Ward

Aarhus University | DK

The research area of Dr. Ward is biogas technology with particular focus on monitoring and pre-treatment technologies, multivariate analysis and process analytical technologies. Monitoring work has involved the application of Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) for online measurement of key process parameters in the anaerobic digestion process, macro nutrient determination in plant material and for estimation of biogas potentials of a variety of substrates.
Mr. Ward obtained his PhD at the University of Bangor, Wales, UK in 2008 on the topic "Optimisation of Biogas Production by Advanced Process Monitoring and the Investigation of the Effect of Mixing Rate Optimisation in the Presence and Absence of Biomass Support Media". He is also the leader of the technology section in Denmark for the Nordic Association of Agricultural Scientists (NJF).

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Christian Wolf

TH Köln | DE

Since 2018, Dr. Christian Wolf is Professor for Instrumentation, Control and Automation of Environmental Processes at the Technical University Cologne. His main fields of expertise are instrumentation and control of environmental processes and application of methods from the areas of multivariate data analysis, machine learning and computational intelligence.
Christian Wolf studied electrical engineering with a focus on automation and industrial IT at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences and received his doctorate from the National University of Ireland Maynooth on the topic "Simulation, Optimization and Instrumentation of Agricultural Biogas Plants". Furthermore, he is co-funder and owner of the Gummersbach Environmental Computing Center GmbH a spin-off of the TH Köln and member of the metabolon research association focusing on advances in circular economy and renewable energy technologies.

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