J Rodriguez-Rodriguez

Wastewater Treatment Research Unit

Hydrogen Research Unit

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BSc, PhD

Dr Rodriguez's main research interest are as follows:
Fundamental research leading to innovative processes for a sustainable society, based on (i) state of the art technology, (ii) multidisciplinary knowledge and (iii) international cooperation.

In particular his specific interests are:
(i) Control of product formation in anaerobic mixed culture fermentations.
(ii) Modelling of microbial fuel cells.
(iii) Modelling and advanced control of anaerobic digestion.

He presented his PhD Thesis entitled "Modelling Anaerobic Mixed Culture Fermentations" in June 2006 at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain. During his pre- and postgraduate experience he was involved in several research projects, two of them funded by the European Commission (EC) in the areas of modelling and advanced control of anaerobic bioprocesses. He started his university studies in 1995 and obtained his BSc degree in Industrial Chemistry at the USC with the 1999 best qualifications. His bachelor thesis dealt with the development of direct search optimisation algorithm. In 1999 he joined the environmental biotechnology research group of Prof. Juan M. Lema at the USC to collaborate in the EC project AMOCO. In 2001 he earned a European ERASMUS fellowship for international students exchange to carry out his MSc thesis at the Universitat Karlsruhe (TH), Germany, in the field of bioprocess modelling.

In September 2001 he obtained MSc degree in Chemical Engineering and enroled in the PhD program of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at the USC. The topic of his PhD was the modelling and advanced control of anaerobic bioprocesses. Dr Rodriguez then worked initially within the EC project TELEMAC where he contributed to the modelling of anaerobic digestion processes and to the development and implementation of advanced controllers. For the last years of his PhD he gained an individual predoctoral fellowship from the FPU Program of the Spanish Ministry of Education. He decided at this point to centre his thesis more in modelling of anaerobic mixed culture fermentations aiming at the control of the product formation. Most of this research was conducted at the Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) at the Dep. of Biotechnology where he spent a total of about nine months, in the group of Prof. Mark van Loosdrecht.

After his PhD thesis Dr Rodriguez spent six months at the Advanced Wastewater Management Centre in the University of Queensland (Australia) in the group of Prof. Jurg Keller where he participated in the development of microbial fuel cell model, as well as in the modelling of anaerobic mixed culture fermentations.