Kristof De Wispelaere is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Molecular Modeling (CMM) at Ghent University. He graduated as chemical engineer at Ghent University in 2011, received a predoctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and obtained his PhD in 2015 under supervision of Prof. Veronique Van Speybroeck. During his PhD he studied advanced molecular simulations of reaction mechanisms and complex reaction environments in the methanol to olefins process. He stayed six months in the computational chemistry group of the van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences at University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Prof. E. J. Meijer, working on the application of advanced molecular dynamics simulations to the study of zeolite-catalyzed reactions.
In 2016-2017 he was a Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) postdoctoral fellow in the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis of Prof. Jens Nørskov at Stanford University (http://suncat.stanford.edu/). He also holds a postdoctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). From September 2017, he is a visiting researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in the group of Felix Studt.
His current computational catalysis research focuses on active site engineering for propene-on-demand processes and controlling selectivity and deactivation for zeolite-catalyzed conversions by using molecular models that mimic realistic operating conditions.
