Pieter Swinkels

Pieter Swinkels serves as Managing Director of the post-MSc EngD designer programmes in chemical product and process design at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and acts as TU Delft coordinator for 4TU.SAI (Stan Ackermans Institute), representing all Dutch EngD programmes. He holds the academic rank of Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering within the Faculty of Applied Sciences.

His educational background includes an Ir. (MSc) degree in Chemical Engineering, cum laude, from Eindhoven University of Technology (1986), specializing in (bio)process design, separation integration, and process control. Prior to joining TU Delft in 2001, he accumulated 15 years of industrial experience at Unilever Research Laboratories (1986-1991) and Unilever's specialty polymers division (1991-2001), where he progressed from R&D roles to divisional process development manager.

Swinkels' research bridges university-industry innovation through (bio)chemical product and process design methodologies, spanning the entire process industry spectrum including energy, food, fuels, health, and specialty chemicals. His work emphasizes:

• Development of chemical product/process design frameworks
• Design thinking and execution methodologies
• Scale-up/scale-down techniques for chemical processes

He teaches these principles to EngD trainees and MSc students through industry-collaborative design projects, leveraging his extensive industrial network to implement academic research in real-world production environments.