(Tuesday, September 26, 2023                                12:00 - 1:00 pm (eastern)

                                                                 Valluzzi slides

The September webinar heard about startups manufacturing high-performance, carbon-negative or fully recyclable materials to compete with or replace manufacturing feedstocks and products. Today, supply chains provide oil, gas and many other extracted materials for making everyday products that often end up on the waste pile – plastic bottles  and bags, batteries, asphalt paving and roofing, cosmetics health care items and more.

These new efforts, based on innovative findings from from labs headed up by MIT Professors Langer and Prather and others, have daunting barriers to success in today's global supply chains and markets.

The challenges for scaling up production can make or break a new business before it enters the market. This webinar featured Deepak Dugar SM '11, MBA '13, PhD '13, who told us about how his venture, Visolis, is evolving and the benefit of partners in commercialization.  Entrepreneur and consultant  Regina Valluzzi '89 shared insights on steps needed to avoid the "valley of death" for startups when manufacturing is involved.

Which, if any, technologies are ready, will take a significant amount fossil carbon out of the mix, and will they be economical at scale? Sustainable substitutes will need effective technology that will fit into circular supply systems, like the natural “food chain” carbon cycle, and they will need efficient and effective processes that can be scaled quickly enough to have an impact.  It is early, but almost too late, to tell which substitutes will succeed.

 Bios:

Regina Valluzzi '89 has deep experience as a technical and business leader, entrepreneur, communicator, educator and consultant. She spent several years as an Industrial Researcher at Akzo Chemicals, now Akzo-Nobel and has been active in a number of emerging areas of molecular structure modeling and polymer process engineering. In her Ph.D. work at the University of Massachusetts, she developed processes and materials using polymers and biopolymers to create complex nanostructures in materials and postdoctoral work with Prof. Sukant Tripathy, led her to simple “green” scalable approaches for biopolymeric nanomaterials fabrication.

Regina has been on the faculty at Tufts University in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. There, she developed several new approaches to creating nanostructured materials, and developed, planned and built multi-use multi-departmental laboratory facilities that seamlessly integrated training, applications development, laboratory demonstrations, and research capabilities.

Deepak Dugar SM '11, MBA '13, PhD '13 is Founder and CEO, Visolis.  While he was an Entrepreneur in residence at the Berkeley Lab, he developed and commercialized a platform technology for production of bio-based materials and fuels.