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Industrial Advisory Board - IAB

Our Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) plays a central role in informing our engagement with industry; course structure; research and general advice about directions and trends in the industry. 

The Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) represent a range of sectors and are composed of both industrial and academic members

Meet our IAB members

Chet Biliyok
Chet Biliyok - Petrofac

Dr Chet Biliyok works at Petrofac as a Senior CCUS Consultant. He has broad experience in process engineering, project execution, technical consultancy and research across the energy industry. He has worked in consulting, engineering and research organisations, delivering projects covering strategy, R&D, feasibility, conceptual design, FEED, detailed engineering and operations support. Chet has authored 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and written articles on energy market analysis and insights for S&P Global Platt’s Energy Economist. Chet is interested in delivering solutions that enable organisations to thrive in a low carbon energy future. He completed his MSc in Chemical Engineering at UCL in 2006.


Kurt Vanden Bussche
Kurt Vanden Bussche - UOP LLC

Dr Kurt Vanden Bussche is the Sr. Director for Technology Development at UOP LLC, A Honeywell Company.  In this capacity, he oversees the development of UOP’s new technologies for refining and petrochemicals production, as well as for the processing of natural gas and renewable feedstocks. After obtaining a Masters and PhD degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Ghent, Belgium, Kurt joined the Shell Research and Technology Center in Amsterdam, where he worked on refinery process modeling, catalyst development and catalyst selection support for the refineries in the Shell Group. In 1996, he moved to UOP where he has since held positions of increasing accountability in both technical and managerial capacities. Kurt is a co-inventor on over 100 US patents and has co-authored some 20 scientific papers. He is a former ISCRE Inc Board member and currently serves on the executive board of AICHE’s Chemical Reaction Engineering Division.  He is also the recipient of the 2014 Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Practice Award of AICHE.


Fabio Chiti
Fabio Chiti - GSK

Dr Fabio Chiti is Director of Process Engineering for the Chemical Development of new Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) with more than 15 years of experience in R&D.  After been formally trained as Chemical Engineering (MSc) he was awarded his PhD in Mixing Applications at the University of Birmingham.  Before joining GSK in 2011, he worked for Merck in Formulation Sciences as Senior Research Scientist developing control released drug products for ‘first time in human’ studies. During his industrial career, he directly contributed to the development of multiple assets including a few that were successfully transferred to commercial manufacturing sites and launched on the market.  In his current role, Fabio manages a global (US/UK) department of process scientists which delivers the scale-up of API manufacturing processes from early clinical phases through commercial production.


Hermann Feise
Hermann J. Feise - BASF

In BASF, Dr Hermann J. Feise is the Senior Expert for R&D Cooperations receiving Public Funding. In this function, he operates as a contact point for researchers from academia as well as from the BASF research divisions. Before joining BASF’s Innovation Management team Hermann Feise was responsible for the Particle Formulation and Handling group at BASF's Chemical and Process Engineering department, providing expert services to the plants and laboratories of the BASF group. His technical interests are in the fields of drying, agglomeration and handling of particles as well as the simulation of particle flow with modern numerical methods. Hermann Feise has served as the President of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering since 2019.


Nick Hazel
Nick Hazel - UCL

Nick Hazel did his first degree and his DPhil in Chemistry at Oxford, followed by 2 years post-doc at Bristol University. He then joined BP in Hull UK, where he spent his whole career in a wide variety of research roles. Importantly, he was also involved in graduate recruitment for a number of years and was trained in the latest company interview methods. Much of his career was spent bridging between disciplines, particularly Chemical Engineering through specialising in advanced reactor modelling and thermodynamics. He also spent a number of years following the EU air pollution techno-political processes, including shadowing the modelling done to support policy development. He authored several early LCA/LCI papers on industrial coatings applications mostly with the automotive industry.  Part of his last few years in BP was spent leading the company’s re-entry into molecular computation, through which he became involved with the London Universities and joined the Department’s IAB when it was formed. Nick took voluntary severance from BP in 2015 after 30 years, and was later appointed Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in Chemical Engineering at UCL, and continues to serve on the IAB.


Andrew Kisiel
Andrew Kisiel

Dr Andrew Kisiel holds a BSc and PhD in chemical engineering from Imperial College, London. Andrew also has a DIC in Statistics. His first job was with GEC Computers and Automation, working on early process control computer systems. When, after 3.5 years, he was offered the management of the software department, he left and joined an American Software House, Digital Applications Inc., to continue doing technical work. This lasted 2 years, after which he became the Executive VP of the small European operation, based in London. 2 years later Andrew was offered and bought the fledging process control computer systems operation consisting of a group 6 people. 50 years on, Digital Application International (DAI) has grown into a company of 250 employees with five offices in the UK, Switzerland and China, working primarily in the supply chain, pharmaceuticals and energy. In March 2020 DAI was sold effectively to the US arm of a German listed company. At the time of sale, Andrew was the Chairman and still actively involved in the business, since then, Andrew has retired and continues to serve as a valued member of the Industry Advisory Board.


Ken Kroenlein
Ken Kroenlein - Citrine Informatics

Dr Kroenlein's work focuses on developing representations of scientific data in a computational context for use in statistical and physical modeling, with a particular emphasis on applying good software engineering practice to scientific software and data handling. His scientific domain expertise is rooted in combustion physics, with a concentration in thermophysical and thermochemical properties of chemical systems, reactive fluid mechanics and radiative heat transfer. Dr. Kroenlein is the Scientific Data Architect at Citrine Informatics, acting as the steward for their novel graph-based data model in their next-generation cloud platform. By adopting strongly data-driven methodologies, robust assignment of uncertainties and maintaining the network of provenance on all data, Citrine provides industrial partners with the information they need to understand in a quantifiable way how to innovate their product lines for today’s high performance, environmentally aware customer need.    


Ian McRobbie
Ian McRobbie - Innospec

Dr Ian McRobbie joined Innospec Executive Team in January 2002 and was shortly appointed as the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology. Prior to this Ian had spent thirteen years as Technical Director of A H Marks and Company Ltd., a privately owned British chemical company operating in the agrochemical and speciality chemical markets. Ian has also held senior research and manufacturing roles for Seal Sands Chemical Co., a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Hexcel Corporation in California and BTP plc, now part of Clariant.
Ian completed his PhD Synthetic Organic Chemist (University of Salford) with over 50 years of industrial experience including senior management responsibility for R&D, engineering, manufacturing and IP. He has vast experience of industrial chemicals and bioprocessing in numerous market sectors from oil/gas to fine chemicals, AgChem and Personal Care.
Ian is a member of various bodies including industry trade association scientific committees, EPSRC SATs, Chemistry Foresight Panels, University Advisory Boards as well as being the industrial supervisor for several dozen PhD students.


Nick Hazel
Neha Solanki - Shell

Neha Solanki graduated from UCL with an MEng Chemical Engineering in 2008. She has worked as a Process Engineer for the past 10 years for Shell in different parts of the oil and gas business varying from refining, gas to liquids, upstream operations in Gabon and recently working within chemicals technology development team in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is on the global board of the Future Energy Lions network in Shell, a grassroots movement of employees looking to accelerate the energy transition and net carbon footprint reduction of the company. In her spare time, she loves to travel to new countries to learn new cultures, this has been replaced with baking since the COVID rules have come into play.


David Thompsett
David Thompsett - Johnson Matthey

Dr David Thompsett has a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Bath in 1987. He joined Johnson Matthey at their corporate Technology Centre (JMTC) in 1986 and initially worked on fuel cells. He has worked in and led teams in a wide range of research areas such as emission control, fuel cells and H2 generation and clean-up as well as competency areas of materials chemistry, characterisation and computational chemistry. Currently, he leads the emission control research group at JMTC, a group of 45 scientists and engineers spanning catalysis, reaction engineering and colloidal science activities.