Staff Directory

Professor Richard Dinsdale is the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies (Project value of £2.7 million lasting from Jan 2020-2029). This fellowship frees up Professor Dinsdale from all non-research activities in pursuit of developing his research topic of “Bio-Electrochemical Process Engineering for Carbon Reduction and Resource Recovery: E-Hance”. A biologist by training, my first degree was in Applied Biology (Biotechnology) and I worked as a microbiologist in a pharmaceutical company before I started my academic career in the area of environmental biotechnology. My PhD research was in the field of anaerobic digestion from the Dept. of Production and Manufacturing Engineering, at the then University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales). My research activities are directed at optimizing microbial cultures for the production of energy either in the form of methane, hydrogen or as electricity directly from bioelectrochemical systems as well as other chemical products such as bioplastics, single cell protein and lipids from low grade biomass resources. This includes either liquid or solids wastes as well as from CO2, H2 and CO gases. I am also interested in the development of novel instrumentation and its implementation in control systems for bioprocess optimization. In recent years I have been concentrating on the development of biolectrochemical systems (BES).

As from January 2020 I have been awarded a Chair in Emerging Technologies by the Royal Academy of Engineering to support my research for up to 10 years. The Academy’s programme made awards totalling more than £22m in research funding to provide long-term support to nine world-leading engineers across the UK to advance emerging technologies. Through this project I aim to develop and commercialise microbial bioelectrochemical systems for waste treatment and resource recovery and will work with key stakeholders to facilitate these developments.

Please see my research at [pure]https://pure.southwales.ac.uk/[/pure