Education

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 under the supervision of Prof. J. M. Asua. 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) under the supervision of Prof. M.S. El-Aasser. 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 of Polymer Materials, POLYMAT from 2011 to 2020.

Honors and awards

In 1993 he received the Rhone-Poulenc award in Clean Technologies organized by the Association of Engineers of Madrid (Spain).
He has published more than 174 papers, 20 book chapters and has coauthored 9 patents and he has supervised 25 PhD students. He is member of the editorial board of the Macromolecular Reaction Engineering and has served as editor in the International Journal of Polymer Science journals. He has also guest edited the special series "Sensors, Process Control and Modeling" of the journal Macromolecular Reaction Engineering. He has organized and co-chaired the International Polymer Colloids Group Conference (IPCG2017 in Arantzazu). He has co-chaired the Polymer Reaction Engineering10 conference organized by ECI (Engineering Conferences International) in Punta-Cana (Dominican Republic) in 2018.

Research

His current research interests are focused on the following topics: polymer reaction engineering aspects of polymerization in dispersed media (e.g., kinetics, modeling, high solids content formulations), 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 adhesives and coatings, and electrospinning of polymer latexes.

Polymerization Processes Group

Publications