Alírio Rodrigues, Emeritus Professor at the U. Porto was invited as Keynote Speaker on the 5th International Conference on Energy and Environment Research (ICEER 2018) that took place at Prague, Czech Republic during July 23-27, 2018.

This year edition of ICEER was organized by Science and Engineering Institute (SCIEI), co-organized by ISEP, sponsored by CIETI&LEPABE.

The lecture entitled "Valorization of Lignin: A Contribution to the Circular Economy in the Pulp Industry" was focused on the research group area Lignocellulosic Biorefinery lead by Prof. Alírio Rodrigues.

Prof. Alírio Rodrigues research areas of interest are:
 - Cyclic Adsorption Processes: SMB; PSA; Electric Swing Adsorption ESA; Parametric pumping; Expanded bed adsorption for various separations: CO2 capture, olefins/paraffins, syngas, H2 purificarion, chiral separations, proteins separations; Perfusion chromatography.
 - Process Intensification: Simulated Moving Bed Reactor (SMBR) and PermSMBR for the synthesis of acetals and green solvents; Sorption Enhanced Reaction Processes (SERP) for H2 production.
 - Biorefineries: Lignin valorization to get vanillin; syringaldehyde & polyurethane.
 - Perfume Engineering and Microencapsulation.

Prof. Alíro E. Rodrigues and Prof. Rui A.R. Boaventura are also members of the Scientific & Technical Committee (STC) of ICEER 2018.

Other information about ICEER 2018 and previous editions: http://www.iceer.net/index.html

LSRE-LCM congratulates Rui Sérgio da Silva Ribeiro for his PhD thesis defense on July 9^th, 2018 at FEUP.

Rui Ribeiro finished his Doctoral Program in Chemical and Biological Engineering, with the PhD thesis entitled Synthesis of Hybrid Magnetic Carbon Nanocomposites for Catalytic Wet Peroxide Oxidation, supervised by Prof. Joaquim Faria and co-supervised by Prof. Helder Gomes and Prof. Adrián Silva.

We wish Rui success for the beginning of the new professional stage at LSRE-LCM!