Andrew Livingston

Professor of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London

Speaker

Andrew Livingston (AGL) was born in New Zealand and studied Chemical Engineering at University, followed by working for 3 years at an NZ food processing company and then moving to the UK to do a PhD in Chemical Engineering at University of Cambridge UK. In 1990, he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. AGL leads a research group of 20 PhD students and Post-Docs, with research interests in membranes for molecular separations in organic liquid systems and their applications to manufacturing. AGL was made full Professor in 1999, has published over 300 refereed papers and been granted 15 patents in chemical technology. Awards include the Junior Moulton Medal, Cremer and Warner Medal, and Underwood Medal of IChemE, and Silver Medal of Royal Academy of Engineering. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2006, he served as Head of Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College from 2008-2016. From October 2016 he has been the inaugural Director of the Barrer Centre at Imperial College, focussed on breakthrough research into separations materials, science and engineering, and in parallel is currently serving as the interim Director of the new Rosalind Franklin Institute, set up with £100M to carry out ground-breaking research at the interface of engineering, physical sciences and life sciences. In 1996, AGL founded Membrane Extraction Technology, a spin-out company which evolved to manufacture solvent stable Organic Solvent Nanofiltration (OSN) membranes. In 2010 MET was acquired by Evonik Industries of Essen, Germany, and continues in business as Evonik MET Ltd., a part of the Evonik Fibres and Membranes Business. In 2018 AGL founded EXACTMER, a new start-up which utilises Nanostar Sieving technology to synthesise polymers with exact monomer sequences, including biopolymers (peptides, oligonucleotides) and synthetic polymers (PEG, polyester…).