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Andrea Buettner has been Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV (Germany) since April 2020. Since 2017, she has headed the Chair of Aroma and Smell Research at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany).
She studied Food Chemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and completed her doctorate and habilitation in the field of Aroma Research at the Technical University of Munich (Germany). When she joined the Fraunhofer IVV in 2007, she launched the new Product Performance business unit as well as the Department of Sensory Analytics, today's department Sensory Analytics and Technologies. At the same time, she set up the Aroma Research working group at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, where she was appointed Professor of Aroma Research in 2012. In 2017, she became Deputy Institute Director at the Fraunhofer IVV and a member of the institute's management in 2019.
In her current role, she is, among others, acatech member, member of the Board of the VDI (Association of German Engineers)-Society Materials Engineering, spokesperson of the Fraunhofer Alliance Food, deputy spokesperson of the Fraunhofer Strategic Research Field Bioeconomy, and on the Board of Management of the EU consortium C-PlaNeT (Circular Plastics Network for Training) and of the Fraunhofer Cluster Circular Plastics Economy CCPE.
Her research interests currently focus on improving and maintaining food and product quality, on impurity and contaminant analysis, and on developing analytics and diagnostics in networked and intelligent systems to ensure the highest product quality and consumer acceptance. Andrea Buettner pays special attention to sustainable and resource-saving management as well as to product safety and consumer protection.
Eckhard Weidner held the Chair of Process Technology at the Ruhr University, Bochum and was director of the Fraunhofer Institute UMSICHT (Energy, Environment, Safety Technology) in Oberhausen. As Chemical Engineer, he invented several sustainable processes, like for example tanning of leather intensified by the supercritical CO2, where the environmental footprint was reduced by 90% or more. In 2016 he initiated the Fraunhofer Cluster of Excellence on Circular Plastics Economy CCPE, which he directed until his retirement in 2022.
More than 100 researchers from 14 Fraunhofer institutes in total are identifying pathways and demonstrate how to transform the linear use of plastics toward a circular way, allowing to responsibly use these unique materials, without spoiling the planets ecosystems. Today the cluster is a highly active network with more than 150 partners from industry, science, politics, and society. Basic research and marketoriented developments complement each other in the cluster to create unique solutions: from circular product design to optimized plastics recycling processes.
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