On the 26th of September Guido de Reijer successfully defended his doctoral thesis. He was the second student I was officially co-supervisor of. The second week in a row (after Alexander last week) I could vitness how 4.5 years of hard work are brought to a conclusion.
Guido worked on the design of a specific class of catalyst material to transform a compound that can be isolated from biomass into valuable feedstock chemicals, mostly benzene in this case. Guido did a tremendous job synthesizing a plathora of samples and learning various techniques to characterize them. Eventually he arrived at some design parameters that help tuning Ga doped zeotypes for this reaction.
He also made use of a lot of gas physisorption experiments. Unfortunately the new lab was now ready too late to have an impact on his work, but I hope this project can continue in some form in the future.

Guido gave an excellent and communicative presentation also praised by the committee and if you got interested in the topic I can warmly recommend to have a look at his thesis. It's a good read.
All the best for your future journey Guido!

The happy, freshly baked doctor and the comittee.
From left to right: Prof. Hanna Härelind (Chalmers, Examiner), Prof. Ulla Lassi (Univ. Oulu, faculty opponent), Prof. Jyri-Pekka Mikkola (Umeå Univ., grading comittee), Dr. Guido de Reijer, Dr. Anders Törncrona (Nouryon, grading committee), Prof. Per-Anders Carlsson (Chalmers, main supervisor), Senior Associate Prof. Emma Björk (Linköping Univ., grading comittee), myself, Prof. Lars Öhrström (Chalmers, grading comittee). Not in the picture: co-supervisor Prof. Anders Hellman.
Photo by Karlijn Gernaat