Dr. Aurora del Carmen Munguía-López
Dr. Aurora del Carmen Munguía-López is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Technical Institute of Celaya and a Ph.D. from the University of Michoacan in Mexico. Her research interests include mathematical optimization, sustainability, social justice, and process modeling. Aurora currently participates in the Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics (CUWP) center. Specifically, she works on developing computational frameworks for the economic and environmental analysis of the solvent-targeted recovery and precipitation (STRAP) process.
George Willis Huber
George Willis Huber is the Richard Antoine Professor of Chemical Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focus is the design of disruptive technologies for the recycling of waste plastics and working to bring these technologies to market. He is the director of the $12.5 million Center for Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics (CUWP).
He is co-founder of two companies that are commercializing technology he developed: Anellotech (www.anellotech.com) and Pyran (www.pyranco.com). He has been named a “highly-cited researcher” in the area of chemistry, an award given to the top 1% most cited chemists. He has published over 230 papers, more than 20 patent applications, and received over 40,000 citations.
Professor Huber has received visiting professorships from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015 (at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics), from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019-20 and the ExxonMobil Visiting Chair Professor at National University of Singapore in 2019. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2005). He obtained his B.S. (1999) and M.S. (2000) degrees in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University.
Zhuo Xu
Zhuo Xu received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering at Michigan Technological University, focusing on the study of removing hazardous compounds from wastes through thermal treatment. Zhuo holds a B.S. degree in Automobile Engineering from Tongji University, China. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on upscaling the Solvent Targeted Recovery and Precipitation (STRAP) technology to recycle pure polymers from the waste stream.
Kevin L. Sánchez-Rivera
Kevin L. Sánchez-Rivera graduated from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez in 2019 and is currently a PhD student in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His current work with Prof. George Huber focuses on developing the Solvent-Targeted Recovery and Precipitation (STRAP) technology to recycle different types of multilayer plastics, as part of the efforts of the Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics (CUWP) center.
Kevin Nelson
Kevin Nelson received a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from UW-Madison. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow in Amcor’s Global Core R&D Group where his research focuses on understanding process/material and product/package interactions.
Amcor is a global packaging company that develops and produces flexible packaging, rigid containers, specialty cartons, closures and services for food, beverage, pharmaceutical, medical-device, home and personal-care, and other products.
Dr. Horacio Aguirre-Villegas
Dr. Horacio Aguirre-Villegas is a Scientist at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research lies at the intersection of climate change, energy, waste management, and food production. He has extensive experience evaluating renewable energy systems and integrating waste-to-energy technologies to increase environmental sustainability. Over the last ten years, he has worked closely quantifying the environmental impacts of conventional and organic dairy systems including greenhouse gas emissions, ammonia emissions, resource use, and nutrients fate. More recently, he has joined the Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics (CUWP) project and is working to better understand current collection of recyclable materials and estimating the impacts of different plastic waste management pathways.
Dr. Aguirre-Villegas received his doctorate in Biological Systems Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has a Master Degree from the Chemistry Institute of Sarria in Barcelona, Spain.