Lab Partnering Service Discovery

Dr. Susan Rempe is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She also holds Adjunct and Research Professor positions in Biology and Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of New Mexico. Her current work focuses on theoretical studies and molecular simulations of solutions, polymers, and biomolecules. In addition to expanding our basic science understanding, insights from those studies inform synthesis of new materials for water purification, energy storage, gas (CO2) separations, new molecules for cancer treatment, and antimicrobials.

Meltem Urgun-Demirtas leads the Bioprocesses and Reactive Separations in Argonne National Laboratory’s Applied Materials Division. The group focuses on re-engineering of plant flow diagram to develop innovative technologies for industrial applications as well as development and application of intensified reactor and separation technologies for bioenergy and bioproducts production, water treatment, and manufacturing. She is also a Fellow at the Northwestern and Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering (NAISE).

Urgun-Demirtas has over 20 years of experience in the design and operation of chemical and bioprocesses, development and scale up of new technologies from bench- to pilot- and field-scale, techno-economic analysis and modeling of processes. Currently, she serves as Argonne’s Program Manager for Bioenergy Technologies Office of DOE which includes sustainability analysis of feedstock and development of new technologies and materials for production of biofuels and bioproducts.

Most recently, Urgun-Demirtas has been working on the development of new processes to produce renewable energy and products from organic waste streams and treatment of wastewater using advanced membrane technologies.

Dr. Laible specializes in Biophysics, with a research emphasis on the metabolic engineering and functional characterization of membrane proteins.

He joined Argonne National Laboratory in 1995 as a post-doc, examining the functional consequences of substitutions in membrane protein complexes of known structure that perform the initial energy and electron transfer reactions in photosynthetic organisms.

He has secured funding from a variety of government and industrial agencies, including the DOE, NIH, DARPA, and pharmaceutical and agribusiness companies. His team specializes in engineered variants of membrane protein complexes for directed abiotic applications, and he has led a large interdisciplinary, inter-institutional effort focused on the design of novel reagents for their stabilization and crystallization.

Activities have recently expanded into the use of the tools that his team has developed in schemes designed to produce next-generation biofuels and bioproducts. He also has long-standing interests in understanding the behavior of microorganisms in communities and regulatory mechanisms involved in energy, nutrient, and carbon utilization. The Argonne team he directs has extensive expertise in microfluidics, biosensors, deep learning, and genetic tools development and collaborates closely with researchers engaged in life-cycle analyses.