At the Institut des Sciences Chimiques de Rennes (ISCR, UMR CNRS 6226) a position related to the fabrication of biopolymeric filtration membranes for liquid phase separations is open for appointment from 01 April 2023 within the team Chemistry and Process Engineering (Head: Pr. Anthony Szymczyk). The postdoc will be recruited for 18 months.

Job description
Membrane techniques are widely used in the biomedical field. For example, 300 million dialyzers are used each year for patients suffering from kidney disease and microfiltration and ultrafiltration are used in more than 70% of biopharmaceutical processes (e.g. vaccine production). For these 2 applications, single-use membranes are used for only a few hours and then replaced, generating a large amount of waste that is usually incinerated or landfilled. Thus, the main idea of this project is to address the issue of the end-of-life of membranes, from their manufacture, by designing, for the first time, biobased membranes that are compostable after use in the framework of a circular economy approach. The success of the project will lie in the ability to develop efficient additives allowing to fabricate membranes having the requested morphological and interfacial properties. The postdoc recruited will be in charge of the experimental part of the project.

The tasks of the postdoc will be:

– to carry out literature review related to the topic

– to synthetize amphiphilic block copolymers from biobased polymers and polyols as additive to improve the membrane properties.

– to fabricate micro- and ultrafiltration membranes using biobased polymers and the amphiphilic block copolymers by the phase inversion technique

– to characterize the membrane properties (morphology, surface properties, mechanical properties)

– to evaluate the filtration performance

– to evaluate membrane biodegradability

– to disseminate the results through written and oral communications

– to supervise undergraduate/master students.

Please find more information here.