Patrick Gerin

Patrick Gerin has a background in chemical and biochemical engineering and a specific interest for mastering on the physico-chemical aspects of (environmental) biotechnological processes.

His activities are mainly dedicated to biomass conversion processes, including anaerobic digestion, acidogenic and ethanolic fermentations, carboxylate chain elongation. His other activities investigate biodegradation and bioremediation processes

His activities include also the related pretreatments and downstream processing.

Since my teenager period, I have always been attracted by understanding (as a scientist) and mastering (as an engineer) the phenomena and processes that are occurring in real life/ environmental/ industrial systems where matter and energy are being transformed and converted, under the action of living organisms as well as abiotic processes. This naturally oriented me to the biochemical engineering domain.

At all steps of my scientific career, I investigated systems at the interface between biology-biochemistry, physical-chemistry and engineering (both at the level of enery & matter transfer and at the level of process technologies). I have been active in very different domains: surface & interface physical chemistry of polymers and living organisms, pharmaceutical biotechnology, soil science, environmental biotechnology, but consistently investigating phenomena at the interface of material science, bioscience and engineering.

In the field of science where I have been active, most background knowledge produced by the scientific community results from investigations in simplified, laboratory models (e.g. single microbial strain in chemically defined media, pure chemical reagents, homogeneous conditions). This is where significant background knowledge on individual processes can be gained and is very valuable. But when it comes to move to real life - environmental or industrial - systems, many (known or unexpected) processes interact (positively or negatively) simultaneously with each other, and affect the control, but also the understanding, of the system behaviour. I focused my scientific career on this specific approach: to integrate the background knowledge gained by the scientific community from model systems, to understand and control the behaviour of more complex, but connected to the real life, systems.

My main current research activities aim at a better knowledge and understanding of the interactions between biocatalyst (micro-organisms, enzymes) activities and extracellular physico-chemical conditions (diffusion limitations, adsorption, enzyme denaturation, pH, redox, etc.) in order to better control these activities and processes at the bioreactor or (bio)process scale. Integrated approaches are of particular importance to investigate bioconversion processes in complex environmental matrices (biomass, biowastes, water, soil) for valorization, bioremediation and biorefining purposes.  My research focuses more specifically on mastering the bioconversion of complex biomass substrates towards specific metabolites (like CH₄, H₂, organic acids, ethanol, etc.), by managing the activities of natural microbial communities through the control of physico-chemical conditions. Some aspects of my research also deal with the fate of extracellular enzymes in such complex matrices. 

My research activities rely on a strong experimental component, and therefore my scientific productivity depends strongly on the rate at which resources and results can be obtained. My research activities also rely on a strong analytical chemistry component. This is why I have been quite involved in the creation of the UCLouvain platform for Mineral & Organic Chemical Analysis of complex matrices (MOCA).