Dr Louise Horsfall is a Lecturer in Biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh and also elected co-chair of the Bioengineering and Bioprocessing section of the European Federation of Biotechnology. She began her career as a chemist at the University of Oxford before moving to Liège, Belgium, to study biochemistry; gaining her PhD in 2007. Louise believes that biotechnology has the potential to transform manufacturing by using waste as a feedstock, rather than it being an end product. Current research projects include the use of bacterial metal reduction and nanoparticle formation pathways to enable the bioremediation of waste, water and land; employing techniques and tools provided by synthetic biology to increase the value of the metals recovered. Collaborative research with industry is focused on improving metallo-enzymes and their production for enhanced lignin degradation. Replacement of the current pretreatments with catalytic degradation would dramatically increase the energy efficiency of bioenergy production and provide new routes to the manufacture of aromatic feedstock chemicals.
Institutional page: http://horsfall.bio.ed.ac.uk
Cohort 2
EPSRC Early Career Forum in Manufacturing Research 