HYBRID EVENT: You can participate in person at Valencia, Spain or Virtually from your home or work.
Thomas J Webster, Speaker at Catalysis Conference
Interstellar Therapeutics, United States
Title : Saving the environment: Removing toxic catalysts from nanoparticle synthesis

Abstract:

Biomaterials is one of the last fields to embrace environmentally friendly technologies where many of our current implants leave a large environmental impact during production and after use, such as stainless steel, titanium, and numerous polymers. Many researchers will claim that our first priority in biomaterials must be to save human lives and that is why environmentally friendly materials have not been embraced as medical devices. Yet, it is clear that we can save human lives with environmentally unfriendly materials and then ruin the environment to eventually hurt human lives. This invited talk will cover how one can synthesize one prominent biomaterial, nanoparticles, not using toxic catalysts but using cells, plants, and other living organisms. It will cover numerous examples of how natural materials themselves can be used to create better wound healing materials, orthopedic implants, anti-cancer materials, anti-infection materials, and more while being environmentally friendly. In fact, numerous examples will be given which show that such naturally-derived biomaterials actually outperform conventional environmentally unfriendly materials in terms of biological properties and implant efficacy

Biography:

Thomas J. Webster’s (H index: 121; Google Scholar) degrees are in chemical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh (B.S., 1995; USA) and in biomedical engineering from RPI (Ph.D., 2000; USA). He has served as a professor at Purdue (2000-2005), Brown (2005-2012), and Northeastern (2012-2021; serving as Chemical Engineering Department Chair from 2012 - 2019) Universities and has formed over a dozen companies who have numerous FDA approved medical products currently improving human health in over 20,000 patients.  His technology is also being used in commercial products to improve sustainability and renewable energy. He is currently helping those companies and serves as a professor at Brown University, Saveetha University, Vellore Institute of Technology, UFPI, and others.  Dr. Webster has numerous awards including: 2020, World Top 2% Scientist by Citations (PLOS); 2020, SCOPUS Highly Cited Research (Top 1% Materials Science and Mixed Fields); 2021, Clarivate Top 0.1% Most Influential Researchers (Pharmacology and Toxicology); 2022, Best Materials Science Scientist by Citations (Research.com); and is a fellow of over 8 societies.  Prof. Webster is a former President of the U.S. Society For Biomaterials and has over 1,350 publications to his credit with over 55,000 citations. He was recently nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

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