Edegem, Flemish Region, Belgium
Chemistry has always been about transformation, and that's exactly what gets me out of bed in the morning. I spent my PhD at the University of Antwerp figuring out how to turn CO2 into useful chemicals. That led me to co-found Oxylum, a startup built on the idea that pollution could be feedstock. It was my first real lesson in how hard it is to move a good idea from lab to market, and how much Europe needs people who understand both sides of that gap. Today I'm CTO at Solvakem, where we've been doing industrial symbiosis before it had a name. We sit between industrial companies and find ways to make one company's waste stream another's raw material. It sounds simple. It rarely is. Getting the chemistry, the logistics, the regulation, and the commercial reality to align at the same time, across borders, across languages, across industries, is where most of the work actually lives.