Guy Van Assche

Guy Van Assche is professor in Materials and Chemistry and heads the  Research Group Sustainable Materials Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research is dedicated to exploring the thermodynamics and kinetics of reactions and (phase) transformations within polymer-based materials to unravel how structure at molecular and mesoscales, processing, and properties interact. To this end, he is involved in, on the hand, the development of advanced thermal analysis methods for experimental studies, and on the other hand, the multiscale modelling of these materials and processes, both contributing to our understanding of how to design sustainable materials in a holistic manner. Having worked on polymerization kinetics and the design of polymer networks since 1992, he became strongly involved in the design of self-healing and reprocessable polymer networks from 2008. Together with Prof. B. Vanderborght (Brubotics-VUB), they pioneered the field of self-healing soft robotics and self-healing tires, which led to start-up company Valence Technologies.