Dr. Diego Lopez Barreiro

Biography

Diego Lopez Barreiro holds an MSc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, which he completed in 2011. He pursued a PhD in Applied Biological Sciences, specifically focusing on Chemistry Bioprocess Technology at Ghent University, Belgium, between 2011 and 2015, with research on microalgae biorefineries and nutrient recovery bioprocess design. Following his doctorate, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2017 to 2019, where he worked on the combined experimental-computational approach for the synthesis of biopolymeric biobased materials. From 2020 to 2022, he worked in the R&D department of DSM, a biotech company in the Netherlands, as a Marie Curie Fellow, focusing on engineering structural proteins for biomedical materials with controllable mechanical and biological properties. In 2022, he joined University College London (UCL) as a lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Diego leads a research group on biopolymeric materials and is the programme director for the MSc in Nature-Inspired Engineering at UCL. Additionally, he serves as the Deputy Departmental Tutor for the MSc programmes within Chemical Engineering at UCL's East campus.

Research Interests

Experience