Keynote speaker Prof. Dr. Robin A. Hutchinson

Queen’s University, Kingston (ON), Kanada

Receiving his B.Eng. from McMaster and Ph.D. from Wisconsin-Madison, Prof. Hutchinson spent 9 years working at DuPont Central Research and Development in the US and Switzerland before returning to Canada to join Queen’s University in 2000. His contributions are recognized internationally by both the polymer science and reaction engineering research communities. A titular member of the IUPAC Polymer Division and one of the most widely cited polymer science researchers in Canada, he has numerous academic and industrial international collaborations, including funded research visits to institutions in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Slovakia.

Prof. Hutchinson has developed specialized pulsed-laser techniques to reduce order-of-magnitude uncertainty in radical polymerization rate coefficients to less than 10%. The information is captured in simulation tools that, after verification by lab-scale experimentation, have been applied to improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption in commercial production of acrylic coatings, water-soluble polymers, and polymeric dispersants.