Katrien Bernaerts (K.V.)

Research chemist polymers with a broad experience in both academia and industry. Main research focus is on the design of polymer materials with tunable properties exploiting the functionality of biobased building blocks. This is enabled by the synthesis of new functional (co)polymers with a variety of architectures (homopolymers, block copolymers, graft copolymers, random copolymers, …) via different chemistries (organic chemistry, controlled or free radical polymerization, ring-opening polymerization, cationic polymerization, step-growth polymerization, polymer modification, … or a combination of them) and the study of their structure-property relationships in several fields of application e.g. stimuli-responsive polymers, coatings, fibres, engineering plastics.