Program

Plenary and Keynote Speakers

Plenary Speakers

Keynote and Invited Speakers



Plenary Speakers

Paul Anastas, Assistant Administrator for Research and Development at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Paul T. Anastas is the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor in the Practice of Chemistry for the Environment and the Director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University. He holds appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Department of Chemistry, and the Department of Chemical Engineering. Trained as a synthetic organic chemist, Dr. Anastas received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University and worked as an industrial consultant. He is credited with establishing the field of green chemistry during his time working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA). Dr. Anastas has published widely on topics of science through sustainability, such as the books Benign by Design, Designing Safer Polymers, Green Engineering, and his seminal work with co-author John Warner, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice. Prof. Anastas has recently been nominated by President Barack Obama to serve as the Assistant Administrator for Research and Development for the US EPA.

The Honourable John Gerretsen, Minister of the Environment, Ontario

John Gerretsen, Minister of the Environment for Ontario, was first elected in 1995 to represent Kingston and The Islands. He was re-elected in 1999, 2003 and 2007.
Minister Gerretsen’s top priority since his appointment as Minister of the Environment has been to guide the implementation of the government’s climate change action plan.
In his current role, Minister Gerretsen introduced legislation to ban the use and sale of cosmetic pesticides province wide. The Act was subsequently passed in June 2008 and came into effect on Earth Day (April 22) 2009. In addition, Mr. Gerretsen introduced landmark legislation to protect Lake Simcoe. The Lake Simcoe Protection Act, which passed unanimously in the legislature, and the expected protection plan are setting a new standard for watershed protection in Ontario. Recently, Minister Gerretsen announced Ontario’s Toxics Reduction Strategy and introduced a proposed Toxics Reduction Act to improve quality of life and develop a greener economy.
He is currently the President of the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment. As Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, he brought forward the award-winning Greenbelt Plan. Mr. Gerretsen was also responsible for new, stronger planning legislation and bringing the Ontario Building Code to the most energy efficient standards in Canada.

Hans-Peter Meyer, Biotechnology Research and Development, Lonza AG

Hans-Peter has an over 30 year’s career, presently in pro- and eukaryotes (including mammalian cells) biotechnology focused on R&D, process development and production. Besides his activity within Lonza, he has, among others, a mandate in the Swiss Innovation Promotion Agency CTI expert team “Life Sciences” and is cofounder of the “Swiss Industrial Biocatalysis Consortium” (SIBC). He received his education and PhD degree at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), was visiting Scientist at the SFI in Stockholm (Sweden), post doctoral fellow in the USA at the University of Pennsylvania and at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA). From 1982 to 1986 he was a group leader and lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich prior to joining the in the chemical development department as bioprocess engineer at Lonza in 1986.

Bob Slater, Carleton University, Coleman Bright & Associates

Robert Slater is adjunct Professor in Environmental Policy at Carleton University. He serves as Vice Chair of the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) and is President of Coleman, Bright and Associates, a consulting firm specializing in Sustainable Development issues. He is a Senior Fellow with the International Institute for Sustainable Development. His former positions at Environment Canada include Senior Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM), ADM of Policy, ADM Environmental Protection, ADM Conservation and Director General for the Ontario Region. As ADM Policy during the late1980s, he was instrumental in establishing the NRTEE and the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Slater played a lead role in the Acid Rain Agreements, Canada-US Accord on Air Quality, and 1990 Green Plan. He led preparations for Canada’s role in the UN Conference on the Environment (“Earth Summit”) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and was responsible for initiatives leading to legislation protecting the environment from toxic chemicals, Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA), and wildlife species at risk (Species at Risk Act, SARA). He also led the development of regulations limiting lead in gasoline and bringing auto emissions standards in line with those in the U.S. He chaired the International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes Water Quality Board. Before joining the public service, he was co-founder of Pollutech, an environmental consulting company.

Peter A. Brenders, President and CEO, BIOTECanada

Peter Brenders joined BIOTECanada as President & CEO in February 2005. Previously, he worked in health and corporate affairs in senior management roles at Genzyme Canada and Schering-Plough Canada. Mr. Brenders has also worked in the Ontario Ministry of Health and in the health consulting practice at KPMG.
Mr. Brenders is currently a member of the Advisory Board for the National Research Council’s (NRC) Institute for Marine Biosciences and the NRC’s Institute for Nutrisciences and Health, a member of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s Life Sciences Advisory Board and the Industry Advisor for the Atlantic Canada Opportunity Agency’s Atlantic Innovation Fund Committees for Aquaculture and Biotechnology Sector and Health and Medical Sector. He is a member of the Advisory Council for Algonquin College's biotechnology program, and has served as a member of the Privy Council Office's Reference Group on Regulating, as a Board member and Treasurer of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario Foundation, and has served as the Chair of its Toronto Chapter of the Canadian College of Health Services Executives.
Mr. Brenders regularly offers industry presentations at domestic and international events and conducts regular lectures to graduate classes at McMaster University. He received his MBA, in Health Services Management from McMaster University. Prior to his brief work in basic research at the Robarts Research Institute, he received his Honours BSc in Pharmacology and Toxicology from the University of Western Ontario.

Keynote and Invited Speakers

Ken Seddon, Queen's University

Kenneth Richard Seddon was born in Liverpool in 1950, and graduated from Liverpool University with a first class BSc(Hons) and a PhD, whence he moved to a research Fellowship at St Catherine's College, Oxford, and later to a Lectureship in Experimental Chemistry at the University of Sussex. In 1993, he was appointed to the Chair in Inorganic Chemistry at the Queen's University of Belfast, where he is also a co-director of QUILL (Queen's University Ionic Liquids Laboratories), an industrial-academic consortium which was awarded the 2006 Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education. He was awarded the 2005 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, and is a Professor Catedrático Visitante at ITQB (New University of Lisbon) and a Visiting Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. He has published over 350 papers and patents, co-authored four books, and co-edited eight books. In addition to ionic liquids and green chemistry, his research interests encompass crystal engineering, coordination chemistry, chemical weapons, and the conservation of pre-tenth Century Chinese manuscripts.

John Vederas, University of Alberta

John C. Vederas received his B.Sc. in Chemistry from Stanford University in 1969 and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1973 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied with the late George Büchi. He did postdoctoral work with Christoph Tamm at the University of Basel and with Heinz Floss at Purdue University. He was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta in 1977, and is currently University Professor of Chemistry and also Canada Research Chair in Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Alberta. He is the author of over 235 publications and 13 patents. He has received several distinctions including the Merck Sharpe Dohme award (1986), the John Labatt Award (1991), the R.U. Lemieux Award (2002), and the Alfred Bader Award (2005) from the Canadian Society for Chemistry. He received the 2008 Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC) Medal. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1997 and made a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) in 2009.

Dan Nocera, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Daniel G. Nocera is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Director of the Solar Revolutions Project and Director of the Eni Solar Frontiers Center at MIT. His group pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry. He has recently accomplished the solar fuels process of photosynthesis outside of the leaf - the splitting of water to hydrogen and oxygen using light from neutral water, at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. This discovery sets a course for the large scale deployment of solar energy by providing a mechanism for its storage as a fuel. He has been awarded the Eni-Italgas Prize (2005), IAPS Award (2006), Burghausen Prize (2007), Harrison Howe Award (2008) and ACS Inorganic Chemistry Award (2009) for his contributions to the development of renewable energy. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was named as Times Magazine 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Tom Rauchfuss, University of Illinois

Thomas B. Rauchfuss is Lycan Professor of Chemical Sciences at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He is the recipient of the ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry and fellowships from the American Chemical Society, Japan Society of the Promotion of Science, Guggenheim , Sloan, Dreyfus, and von Humboldt Foundations. In recent years, the Rauchfuss group has described functional active site models for the hydrogenases. This family of evolutionarily optimized catalysts operate by pathways unprecedented in the inorganic and biochemical literature.

Jim Hutchison, University of Oregon

B.S., University of Oregon, 1986. Ph.D., Stanford University, 1991 (James P. Collman). Postdoctoral: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1992–94 (Royce W. Murray). Honors and Awards: Phi Beta Kappa; Franklin Veatch Fellowship, Stanford 1987–89; Centennial Teaching Assistant Award, Stanford, 1990; NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, 1992–94; Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award, 1994; NSF CAREER Award, 1997; Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, 1999; Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, 1999; Oregon Academy of Science Outstanding Teacher of Science and Mathematics in Higher Education, 2003, University of Oregon Fund for Faculty Members Excellence Award, 2006. Lokey-Harrington Chair in Chemistry, 2008. At Oregon since 1994.

Andreas Liese, Institute of Technical Biocatalysis

Prof. Dr. Andreas Liese received his PhD (1998) from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Bonn within the Research Center Jülich (in collaboration with DSM Research) where he became Assistant Professor and Head of the Enzyme Group within the Institute of Biotechnology II. In 2000 he initiated a R&D group on biocatalysis at Pfizer Global R&D, San Diego. From 2003 to 2004 he worked as Associate Professor at the University of Münster, receiving a full professorship for Technical Biocatalysis at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) as the Director of the Institute of Technical Biocatalysis, which he continues to expand. Prof Liese received the 2003 Award of Up-and-Coming Teacher in Higher Education in the field of biotechnology (DECHEMA, Germany). He is an elected member of the steering committee of the Germany Catalysis Society. His three books ("Industrial Biotransformations", "Biological Principles Applied to Technical Asymmetric Catalysis" and "Biocatalysis for the Pharmaceutical Industry") illustrate his research interests in bioprocess engineering, enzyme technology and asymmetric biochemical synthesis.