Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Postdoctoral Fellow

E18-509

Email: fhvermei@mit.edu

Florence Vermeire   is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Green group. She is working on pharmaceutical discovery and synthesis planning and predicting chemical properties with the aid of machine learning.

She received her Diploma and Ph.D degree in Chemical Engineering from Ghent University. During her Master studies she did two internships at Proviron and Total-Lukoil Zeeland Refinery. For her Master dissertation she performed research in the field of polymer design on nitroxide-mediated (co)polymerization. Florence did her Ph.D at the Laboratory for Chemical Technology under the guidance of prof. Kevin Van Geem and prof. Guy Marin. For the acquisition of experimental results, she spent three months in the group of dr. Frédérique Battin-Leclerc at LRGP in Nancy and one month in the group of prof. Fei Qi at NSRL in Hefei.

For her thesis, Florence studied the gas-phase decomposition and oxidation chemistry of biomass-related model components. The investigated model components are representative for fractions available in biodiesel, oxymethylene ether fuel additives, bio-oil and a bio-naphtha produced from lignocellulose biomass. She used a combined experimental, quantum chemical and computer-aided automatic kinetic modeling approach. Experimental measurements were done on three different units, a tubular reactor with a dedicated analysis section involving GCxGC, a jet-stirred reactor with online GC and a tubular reactor connected to SVUV-PIMS. Microkinetic models are developed using the software Genesys. During her thesis, Florence highly contributed to improving the thermodynamic and kinetic databases by performing quantum chemical calculations. These were done using Gaussian v09 or v16 on the high-performance computing infrastructure at Ghent University.