People

Jose Ramon Leiza (Professor of Chemical Engineering) graduated from the University of the Basque Country in 1987, and obtained the Ph.D. degree in 1991 from the same university working in the monitoring and control of emulsion polymerization reactors. In 1992 he obtained a position as assistant professor in the Department of Applied Chemistry of the University of the Basque Country. In 1994 he spent a one year post-doctoral stay as research associate at the Emulsion Polymers Institute of Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA, USA). In 1995 he was promoted to associate Professor. In 2004 he spent a sabbatical year at Queen’s University (Kingston, On, Canada). In 2010 he was promoted to full Professor at the University of the Basque Country. He has served as Director of the Institute for Polymer Materials, POLYMAT from 2011 to 2020 and it is currently the group leader of the Polymerization Process group of the Basque Center for Macromolecular Design and Engineering which is formed as average by 7 permanent members, 3-5 post-doctoral students and average of 25 PhD students.
He has published more than 187 papers, 20 book chapters and has coauthored 9 patents (4 of which are granted).

In the last 10 years he has been the principal investigator of 5 European projects (1 ITN, 3 NMP and 1 SPIRE), 5 MINECO/MCIN projects, in 3 of them as principal investigator.

In addition, in the same period he has signed research contracts with 7 companies (2 local companies (Oribay Mirror buttons and Fresmak) and 5 multinational companies (IPAGSA, Wacker Chemie, IFF, Elix Polymers and Chryso).

The Polymerization Process group holds a consortium of companies that fund the research in “Polymerization in Dispersed media”. Currently the consortium is formed by 13 multinational companies of the polymer latex sector: Akzo-Nobel, Allnex, Arkema, Asian Paints, BASF, Covestro, Elix polymers, Innovyn, Sthal, Synthomer, TESA, Vinavil and Wacker Chemie.

Within the activities of the consortium the group offers a one week short course (23 hours) on “Emulsion Polymerization” every year. Attendance of the course is of approximately 40-50 per year. Within the short course he teaches 5 hours. We have also offered in-house the course to the companies Sythomer and Asian paints.

He has supervised 24 PhDs (16 in the last 10 years) and is currently supervising 6 (four of which are funded by industry). Furthermore, in the last years, he has supervised 10 Master Thesis projects (TFM) and 6 undergraduate projects (TFG)

He has been in charge of more than a dozen of post-doctoral fellows that has participated in the research activities of the projects described above.

He is member of the editorial board of the Macromolecular Reaction Engineering journal. He reviews manuscripts for more than 20 journals in the areas of polymer chemistry, adhesives, coatings, chemical engineering and others.

His current research interests areas are: polymer reaction engineering aspects of polymerization in dispersed media (e.g., kinetics, modeling, monitoring and control and characterization), waterborne polymer/inorganic hybrid nanocomposites for anticorrosion coatings, polymerization of water soluble monomers as additives for concrete, renewable resource monomers and their application for the production of novel biobased and biodegradable adhesives and coatings, and electrospinning of polymer latexes.