Mike Biddle, Evok Innovations
Dr. Mike Biddle is the Managing Director of Evok Innovations, an entrepreneur-led cleantech venture fund that aims to increase the scale, diversity, and quality of early-stage innovations focused on clean energy, reducing the time it takes to commercialize technologies. Evok accomplishes this by connecting entrepreneurs with flexible capital, mentors, and industry partners. Before Evok, Mike founded MBA Polymers—literally from his garage. He grew MBA Polymers to the world’s leading multinational company recovering plastics from end-of-life durable goods, such as computers, electronics, appliances, automobiles, and now household waste.
Mike received a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Louisville and a Ph.D. in polymer science and engineering from Case Western Reserve University, both with high honors. He was also a Sloan Fellow at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, graduating with an M.S. in management science. Mike has won numerous international awards, including the 2017 SME Circulars Award and the Davos Prize at the World Economic Forum.
Matt Terwillegar, Danimer Scientific
Matt Terwillegar has been in product development for 25 years, specifically in the field of biotechnology for ten years. He specializes in application development of bioplastics, biocomposites, and bio-based coatings. He began his career as a product development chemist at Reichhold in 1996, worked as a plant engineer at Piedmont Chemical in High Point, North Carolina, and then as an application development manager at Myriant Corporation. He has recently joined Danimer Scientific as product engineer.
Matt holds a B.S. in organic chemistry from Rollins College in Winter Park, FL and an M.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Bill Orts, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Services
Dr. William J. Orts is the Research Leader for Bioproducts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Services Western Regional Research Center where he oversees a team that aims to add optimal value to agricultural coproducts, especially from under-valued biomass sources found in the Western United States. He has over 30 years of experience in research related to biofuels and bioproducts with over 200 publications and more than 125 invited presentations.
Bill's masters work focused on fermentation scale-up of gums derived from wood sugars and Ph.D. research carried out at the Xerox Research labs on developing polyhydroxyalkanoates as a commercial biopolymer.
Amy Waun, Procter & Gamble
Amy Waun is a Senior Scientist in the Corporate R&D Division of The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned her Ph.D. in materials engineering and science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) and her B.S. in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame. Amy is a member of the P&G team staffed full-time to support PureCycle Technologies. She applies her academic training and more than 17 years of industrial experience in chemistry and materials science and engineering to lead the polymer analytical characterization for feedstock selection, process development, and product development for PureCycle Technologies.
Frédérique Guillamot, Carbios
Frédérique Guillamot holds a Ph.D. in environmental biosciences from Marseille University (France) and joined Carbios in 2012. As Innovation Manager, she is responsible for identifying and implementing innovative projects. Carbios, a French cleantech company listed on the Paris stock exchange, has successfully completed a five-year, multi-million euro collaborative R&D program and is now moving to industrialization with two disruptive biological innovations that provide solutions for the end-of-life of polymers. In particular, Frédérique is involved in the management of Carbios’ process of infinitely recycling polyester (PET) without any quality loss, opening up the possibility for a virtuous circular economy scheme.
Gregg T. Beckham, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Gregg T. Beckham is a Senior Research Fellow and Group Leader at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007. Gregg currently leads and works with an interdisciplinary team of biologists, chemists, and engineers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on green processes and products using chemistry and biology, including in the areas of biomass conversion and plastics upcycling.
Stacy Katz, Waste Management
Stacy Katz is Waste Management’s Senior Manager of Materials Management and Quality. In this role, Stacy leads the quality program for Waste Management’s recycling business. Stacy is responsible for improving the quality of material received at Waste Management recycling facilities from customers, as well as the quality of sorted commodities produced. She develops and implements strategic planning initiatives and identifies operational improvements that increase the quality and quantity of material diverted from the waste stream. Prior to this position, Stacy was Waste Management’s Municipal Manager of Recycling and Diversion for the Western Group, where her focus was to increase the volume of recyclables from municipalities throughout the West and she was previously a Senior Environmental Consultant focusing on zero waste initiatives with large corporate clients.
Stacy holds a master’s degree in environmental science and management and has experience in zero waste initiatives, program and product management and has designed and implemented both environmental and business solutions.
Jason Locklin, University of Georgia
Jason Locklin obtained his B.S. from Millsaps College in 1999. He graduated with his M.S. in chemistry from University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2002 and Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2004. Jason then went on as a Director of Central Intelligence Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University in 2005 in the Department of Chemical Engineering. In 2007, Locklin joined the University of Georgia in the Department of Chemistry and the College of Engineering and was promoted to Professor in 2018. He founded the New Materials Institute in 2016 that focuses on green engineering principles and circular materials management.
Jason has been awarded the Central Intelligence Agency Young Investigator Award (2007), National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2010), the Northeast Georgia American Chemical Society Chemist of the Year for Research (2009–2010), and the Atlanta Magazine Groundbreaker Award (2011). He is a Distinguished Faculty Scholar in the College of Engineering and the Site Director for the National Science Foundation Industry University Collaborative Research Center—Center for Bioplastics and Biocomposites at the University of Georgia.
Scott Farling, Titus MRF Services
Scott Farling is the Vice President of Business Development and Research for Titus MRF Services, a leading systems integrator for the waste and recycling industry and developer of secondary material recovery facilities. After more than a decade working in the specialty chemicals industry, Scott shifted careers to follow his passion and focus on recycling and recovering value from complex waste streams with MBA Polymers, Inc. and Agilyx Corporation. In addition to his work with Titus, he co-founded the Ocean Plastics Recovery Project and is working to clean up the oceans and coastlines and find end-of-life recycling and recovery solutions for ocean plastics.
Scott holds a B.S. in chemical engineering with a minor in environmental engineering from The Pennsylvania State University.
Eric Klingenberg, Mars Advanced Research Institute
Eric has a B.S in chemistry with a minor in biology from Geneva College and a Ph.D. in polymer chemistry from The Pennsylvania State University. During his 20+ year career as an industrial researcher and R&D leader, he has worked in multiple fields of study, including new material development, manufacturing scale-up, and process optimization.
Currently, Eric is part of the Mars Advanced Research Institute (MARI) where he leads the Materials Science Platform. His interests include the development of new materials and processes to reduce the environmental impact of plastic packaging. He also serves on several university advisory boards and is a technical advisor for the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design, a consortium of national labs and universities working to develop and expand the use of data and computation tools to accelerate advanced materials design.
Cristina Negri, Argonne National Laboratory
Cristina Negri is the Director of the Environmental Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory where she leads its strategic programmatic direction inclusive of a diverse research portfolio in environmental sciences. As a scientist, her current work focuses on developing innovative land-use approaches and functional landscapes to achieve environmental services, conservation, and input-efficient bioenergy crop feedstocks, and to leverage productive use impaired/marginal land and polluted water resources both in urban and agricultural contexts. Her interests lie in finding solutions that embrace circular economy concepts and apply them to find practical solutions to address global growth under limited resources and climate change constraints.
Jill Martin, Dow Chemical Company
Jill Martin is a global sustainability fellow at the Dow Chemical Company. For the past 25 years, she has served in both research and development and technical service and development in the performance plastics field. Jill is a member of the Michigan State University and California Polytechnic State University Packaging Advisory Boards and serves on the ISTA Global Advisory Board.
Jill received her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in polymer engineering and science from Case Western Reserve University, where her research focused on structure/property relationships in polyethylenes, a field she has continued to work in during her career with Dow.