Chris Rielly is currently Head of the Chemical Engineering Department, having been appointed to chair at Loughborough University in 1999; prior to that was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge for 13 years. He obtained his PhD from Imperial College on two-phase mixing in stirred vessels and subsequently conducted post-doctoral research at Cambridge University Engineering Department on turbulent mixing of passive and reactive scalars. He has 25 years of experience working in experimental fluid mechanics and in particular on multi-phase flow and turbulent mixing within stirred chemical reactors. Current and recent research projects include particle image velocimetry in multi-phase stirred tank flows, CFD and population balance modelling of gas-liquid flows in stirred tanks, de-agglomeration and dispersion of formulated nano-particle products, direct nucleation control of pharmaceutical crystallisations, model based control and estimation of crystallization processes, spray freeze drying and spray drying of foods and pharmaceuticals.

Professor Xue Z. Wang holds a Personal Chair in Intelligent Measurement and Control in the Institute of Particle Science & Engineering , and is Director of Research of the School of Process, Environmental and Materials Engineering at the University of Leeds. Prior to this Chair appointment, XZW was the Malvern Reader in Intelligent Measurement and Control, sponsored by Malvern Instruments Ltd. XZW’s recent research has focused on the following areas: (i) on-line process analytical technology and quality control for particulate processes (NIR, ATR FTIR, zeta-potential, acoustic spectroscopy, laser light scattering); and (ii) data mining and knowledge discovery (wavelets, neural networks, principal and independent component analysis, multivariate statistical process control, automatic decision tree generation, link analysis, multidimensional visualization).; as well as (iii) process modeling (computational fluid dynamics and population balance modeling) , optimization and control of pharmaceutical and nanomaterial processes.

Dr James Evans received his PhD in Chemical and Process Engineering from Herriot Watt University and an MS in Instrumentation and Analytical Chemistry from UMIST. In addition to this he completed postdoctoral research at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Dr Evans has extensive experience in API pharmaceutical manufacturing and R&D for both MNC’s and biotech companies. In his current role as the Associate Director at the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing he has responsibility for delivering a bench scale Integrated Continuous Manufacturing platform that can be utilized as a model and learning tool for transforming the pharmaceutical manufacturing paradigm

Luc Aerts finished his PhD in 1992 at the Catholic University of Leuven (B) in physical chemistry on phase behaviour of polymer-solvent systems. After his PhD he went to industry and took research positions in different sectors, be it always from a physico-chemical perspective. Starting off in the plastics area, he shifted to the food ingredients industry and finally joined UCB Pharma in 2008. He now holds the position of Associate Director Solid State Characterization.

Emmeline Marttin is working as a senior patent examiner at the European Patent Office in the Hague since November 1999. She is involved in searching and granting patent applications in the field of galenics, or pharmaceutical technology, which is part of the cluster Pure and Applied Organic Chemistry. She also has experience in of the technical field of diagnostics (biotechnology). Besides doing search and examination, she is involved in oppositions of patents in the fields of galenics, biomaterials, cosmetics, dentistry and pesticides. She is also a trainer and coach for newcomers at the European Patent Office. Before joining the EPO she has worked for Johnson & Johnson, doing research in the field of New Drug Delivery Systems at Janssen Pharmaceuticals in Belgium. She obtained her Master's degree and PhD in Biopharmaceutical Sciences at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

Gérard Coquerel was born on the 16th of March 1955. He has made his whole academic cursus at the University of Rouen. He started first to specialize in inorganic chemistry (PhD in 1981) and then in solid state chemistry of organic components (Docteur d’État 1986 i.e. Habilitation, in collaboration with Jean Jacques at the Collège de France in Paris). He is Professor at the University of Rouen since 1997, Head of the research unit: ‘Cristallogenesis Unit’ that he created. This research group has been structured into an independent laboratory in 1998 by the French Ministry of Research under the official affiliation number EA 3233. His main research activities are focused on: chirality, resolution of chiral molecules, phase diagram determinations, molecular recognition, polymorphism, solvates and desolvation mechanisms, nucleation and crystal growth of molecular compounds. Part of these activities are fundamentals and another part is dedicated to more applied researches with a strong impact in pharmaceutical , cosmetic and fine chemistry industries.

Fields of expertise

• Phase diagrams between condensed phases; solid phase identifications and heterogeneous stable and metastable equilibria
• Crystallization of molecular species, Preparative purifications by means of crystallization, preferential crystallization: inventor of the AS3PC process: Auto-Seeded Polythermic Programmed Preferential Crystallization
• Chiral discrimination in the solid state
• Molecular modelling at the interfaces between Crystal and Solution ; nucleation mechanisms, supra-molecular interactions (host-guest associations, co-crystals, etc).

Martin Bohlin is a Principal Scientist in crystallisation at Pharmaceutical Development, Physical Science, Södertälje, Sweden. He received a MSc in Chemical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (RIT), Sweden in 1986 and a PhD in Chemical Engineering in 1993 under supervison from Prof. Åke Rasmuson. Since then, he has been working for AstraZeneca where he has been involved in a large number of drug projects. He has practical and theoretical experience with all types of crystallization development work such as salt- and polymorph screening, resolutions, crystallization method development, scale-up, optimization and QbD, supercritical crystallisation, trouble shooting etc.

Dr Zoltan K Nagy is a professor and leader of the Process Control and Pharmaceutical Systems Engineering Research Group in the Chemical Engineering Department at Loughborough University, United Kingdom. Before joining Loughborough University in 2005, he worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, (2001-2003) and at the University of Stuttgart, (2003-2005). His research interests include: pharmaceutical systems engineering, modelling, monitoring, optimization and control of crystallization systems, population balance modelling, and process analytical technologies. Dr Nagy is the UK representative in the Crystallisation Working Party of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering. He was the subject funder and currently is subject editor (Pharmaceutical Engineering) for Chemical Engineering Research and Design, and Associate Editor for Control Engineering Practice. Dr. Nagy received best paper awards from Journal of Process Control (2008), Control Engineering Practice (2008), IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology (2005), ESCAPE (2008), Chemical Research Collaboration Success Award, from the Council for Chemical Research, USA (2009), and was the runner up for the Innovator of the Year Award of IChemE (2010). In 2011 he was one of the recipient of the prestigious European Research Council Fellowship for the project CrySys – Crystallisation Systems Engineering – Towards a next generation of intelligent crystallisation systems.

Dr Peter A. Wood graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a Masters in Chemical Physics in 2004. He then stayed in Edinburgh to do a Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Simon Parsons and Dr Elna Pidcock (CCDC), studying the effect of high pressure on the topological properties of molecular crystal structures. His thesis work demonstrated the value of using Hirshfeld surfaces and energy calculations along with database analyses to interpret high-pressure crystal structures. In 2007, he took up a position at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre as a Research and Applications Scientist.

Pete is an active researcher in the field of Crystal Engineering and is particularly interested in topics such as the preferred geometry of intermolecular interactions and the relative stabilities and structural similarities of crystalline forms. In the past he has investigated the effects of high pressure on intermolecular interactions in the organic solid state. The interplay between experimental and computational methods has been crucial in this high pressure work as well as the projects he has continued to work on since then. Pete's current research is aimed at investigating ways of using knowledge-based methods and theoretical calculations to interpret and inform experimental work in the area of solid form design and prediction.

Susan Reutzel-Edens is a Senior Research Advisor in Pharmaceutical Sciences Research & Development at Eli Lilly & Company in Indianapolis, Indiana. She received her B.S. degree in Chemistry from Winona State University in 1987 and obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1991 under the direction of the late Professor Margaret C. Etter. She then joined Eli Lilly & Company in 1991 to begin a solid-state NMR spectroscopy (SSNMR) program at Lilly and to develop applications of this technique for the physical characterization of pharmaceutical solids. Her research interests now include 1) crystal polymorphism, 2) crystal engineering, 3) crystallization of small-molecule drug crystal forms (polymorphs/solvates), 4) the integration of SSNMR spectroscopy, thermal analysis, X ray diffraction, microscopy, moisture sorption analysis, and molecular and crystal modeling, for their identification and characterization, and 5) the elucidation of structure-property (stability, solubility, intrinsic dissolution rate, etc…) relationships. She developed and now leads the comprehensive polymorph and solvate screening effort at Lilly, from which commercially-viable drug crystal forms are identified. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Crystal Growth and Design, CrystEngComm and the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Mark Barrett joined the Solid State Pharmaceutical Cluster (SSPC) from Merck to take up a position as a Senior Research Fellow. The objective of his role is to advance novel process development techniques and to develop the clusters multi-company continuous crystallization platform project. Expanding the clusters company interactions is also a key aspect to Mark's role.

Eric Sirota is a Senior Chemical Engineer in the Chemical Process Development and Commercialization department at Merck. Eric has supported lab development, pilot scale manufacture, and/or commercial validation on over thirty drug candidates. Eric has been with Merck since graduating from the University of Michigan in 2003 with a Bachelors degree in Chemical Engineering. Since November 2011, Eric has been starting up a crystallization lab for Merck in Werthenstein, Switzerland.

Sean is Principal Consultant and VP Solids at Process Systems Enterprise Ltd (PSE). His main responsibility is the product development, business development and service delivery for all solids processing and crystallisation-related business. Prior to this role, he was Global Head of Consulting at PSE for 6 years.

He is a Chemical Engineer with a PhD in crystallisation from Delft University of Technology (2003) an Executive MBA from Imperial College London (2009).

His research interests with respect to crystallisation include the development of conceptual design procedures, combining detailed crystallisation process models with hydrodynamic models, such as CFD, to reduce the significant risk often associated with process scale-up, and the development of modelling tools that can be used by crystallisation experts who do not possess modelling skills.

As a Principal Consultant, Sean has been involved in numerous crystallisation projects for companies including BP, MCC, LG Chem, Eli Lilly, GSK, FrieslandCampina and SQM where modelling was applied to reconcile process and experimental data, estimate kinetic parameters, scale-up processes and optimise both batch and continuous processes.