Summary

I am a Postdoc Researcher currently working on PET plastic degradation with focus on enzymatic recycling of textiles. Post-consumer waste polyester textile represent a valuable feedstock for the production of chemical building blocks which can be further utilized for the production of new textiles and/or plastic bottles, for example. My work aims to evaluate the deconstruction of polyester textiles by different enzymes, understand how they work and are affected by additives and dyes present  in the fabrics, and ultimately optimize this technology in an industrial scale.

Biography

I am Biologist, PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology by the University of Campinas, Brazil, with 10 years of experience in industrial biotechnology, microbiology and genetics of microorganisms, lignocellulose, and upcycling of plastics.

During my Msc (2014-15) and PhD (2015-19), I worked with omics-driven approaches of filamentous fungi (Aspergillus niger and Trichoderma reesei), fungal transformation (USP-Brazil and TU Wien, Austria), and lignocellulose deconstruction at the Brazilian Biorenewables National Laboratory (LNBR/CNPEM). 

In 2020, I worked as a Postdoc Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. How fungi can convert the lignin-based compounds into high-value added products (e.g. vanillin and vanillyl alcohol), and the main metabolic pathways involved in these processes were some of the topics of my research.

At Finnish company VTT (2021-22), I started working with plastics. My goal was to employ different enzymes to degrade polyolefins (PE and PP) and PS plastics, mainly. These enzymes could be initiating one of the first steps in the conversion of these recalcitrant and inert plastics, making them more accessible to the action of other enzymes. 

In May 2023, I joined Prof. Dr. Andrew Pickford`s group at CEI, UK, as a PostDoc Researcher to work in a project aiming at enzyme conversion of waste polyester textiles. The main goals include to evaluate the feability of enzymatic degradation of textiles in the presence of additives and dyes, protein engineering of enzymes to enhance their thermostability and activity, and test this enzyme technology in an industrial scale using bioreactors.