Krister Holmberg, Professor of Applied Surface Chemistry, Head of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Chalmers.
Research interests: surfactants, nanotechnology, reactions in microheterogeneous media, biotechnological surface chemistry.
Krister Holmberg is professor of Applied Surface Chemistry at Chalmers University of Technology and also Head of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. He was Director of the Institute for Surface Chemistry in Stockholm between 1991 and 1998. Before that he was Research Director of Berol Nobel, today AkzoNobel Surface Chemistry. He has also worked at Eka Kemi, nowadays Eka Chemicals and in the pharmaceutical industry.
Krister is actively involved in research in close contact with companies in different fields. Through the years he has had many industrial PhD students working in such diverse areas as novel surfactants, biotechnological surface chemistry, and material science. He is currently involved, as a Board Member or as a scientist, in several industrial consortia, not only Supramolecular Biomaterials – SuMo, but also The Swedish Competence Center for Catalysis – KCK, Avancell – Research related to the cellulose fibre, WooDi – Research towards diapers based on natural raw materials, and Marine Paint – development of environmentally benign antifouling paints.
Krister’s research group today comprises 10 persons. He is actively involved in two SuMo activities, Biocatalysis in biopolymer gels, which is run as a postdoc project, and Release of bioactive substance from wound care products, which is conducted as an industrial PhD project. The former project concerns the action of trypsin in alginate gels and the latter relates to development of a concept for controlled release of biocides into a wound. Krister is also a Board Member of SuMo.
Krister’s research is financed from the Swedish Research Council, Vinnova (through SuMo), the KK Foundation, and industry. He is currently engaged in projects on organic and bioorganic reactions in confined media such as gels, ordered mesoporous materials, surfactant liquid crystals, and microemulsions. He also works on characterization of novel surfactants, such as amino-acid based amphiphiles, gemini surfactants, and environmentally benign cationic surfactants. Another active area of research is incorporation of water into diesel, as an emulsion or as a microemulsion, and testing the effect of the dispersed water on emission of particles and NOx in the exhaust during combustion in a diesel engine. There are also activities in the group related to synthesis, characterization and catalytic evaluation of nanoparticles of noble metals and of noble metal alloys. Krister is also engaged in one project aiming at understanding the mechanism of formation of ordered mesoporous silica and in another project that aims at the development of concepts of stabilizing alumina pigments against water.
Through the years, Krister has published 234 papers, has 36 patents and has written or edited 6 books.
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