Technical Committee
The Technical Committee is represented by:
Dr. Colin Li Pi Shan
The DOW Chemical Company, USA
Colin Li Pi Shan joined DOW in 2002 and is a development specialist in the field of polyolefin elastomers supporting Plastics Research and Development. Colin's responsibilities include being a subject matter expert for polyolefin microstructure analysis to support resin and product development, production, and intellectual asset needs.
Colin received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Prof Joao Soares.
Dr. Benjamin Monrabal
Polymer Char, Spain
Benjamín Monrabal was born in 1946 in Valencia, Spain. He received a Chemical Engineering degree in the Instituto Químico de Sarriá, Barcelona and a PhD degree in Chemistry at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the US.
Dr. Monrabal worked for DOW Chemical from 1970 till 1993 in the R&D organization. He was named an Associate scientist for his technical contributions in the Polyolefin business. Meanwhile at DOW he invented and patented the Crystallization Analysis Fractionation technique (CRYSTAF).
He has authored many publications on Polyolefins Characterization and is collaborating with various Universities, Research Institutes and leading Polymer companies in the development of new methodologies for extensive characterization of Polyolefins. He has been a member of the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Polymer Analysis and Characterization and Journal of Liquid Chromatography.
Currently, Dr. Monrabal is responsible for the R&D department at Polymer Char, and he has recently developed a new crystallization technique Crystallization Elution Fractionation (CEF) for the fast analysis of Polyolefins.
Prof. João Soares
University of Waterloo, Canada
João Soares is a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He received his bachelor’s degree from Federal University of Bahia (1983, Salvador, Ba, Brazil) and his master’s degree from the State University of Campinas (1985, Campinas, SP, Brazil), both in Chemical Engineering.
Before moving to Canada, he worked during four years as a research and development engineer for Pronor, COPENE, and Polibrasil (Brazil). He did his PhD thesis under the supervision of Professor A.E. Hamielec, in the Department of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University (1994, Hamilton, ON, Canada) and joined the faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Waterloo in 1995.
Professor Soares’s research interests are: 1) polymerization reactor engineering for Ziegler-Natta, metallocene, late transition metal, free-radical and living free-radical polymerization, 2) polymer microstructural characterization and fractionation, 3) mathematical modeling of polymer microstructure, and 4) in-situ polymer nanocomposites. He has published more than 140 articles in referred journals and written 10 book chapters. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering and the member of the Executive Advisory Board of all Macromolecular journals (Wiley-VCH) responsible for the coordination of Macromolecular Reaction Engineering. Professor Soares is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada and the recipient of the Premier’s Research Excellence Award (2000), the Union Carbide/Dow Innovation Recognition Program (2000,2001), and the Syncrude/CSChE Canada Innovation Award (2001). He is also a consultant for several polyolefin-manufacturing companies in Canada, USA, Europe and Brazil.
Prof. Minoru Terano
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology –JAIST-, Japan
Professor Minoru Terano was born in 1953. He recieved a PhD from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1981. He worked for Toho Titanium Co., Ltd. from 1981 to 1992 as a leader of catalyst R&D group.
He joined Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology –JAIST- in 1993 as a full professor. His major research fields have been all aspects of Polyolefin relating technologies.
Prof. Dujin Wang
Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences –ICCAS-, China
Professor Dujin Wang is a deputy director of Institute of Chemistry, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the director of CAS Key Laboratory of Engineering Plastics. The research interests of Prof. Wang’ s group include the structure-property relationship of polyolefin materials, preparation of high performance polyolefin alloys by post-processing, confined crystallization of long chain alkanes in restrained geometry.
