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José María Escola Sáez

Dr. José María Escola Sáez received his PhD in 1998 working on the synthesis and applications of mesostructured materials for the feedstock recycling of polyolefins to fuels. He undertook a postdoctoral research stay in the group of professor Mark E. Davis at CALTECH working on the applications of zeolites for obtaining drug intermediates. Currently, he is Full Professor in Chemical Engineering at Rey Juan Carlos University and founding member of the High-Performance Chemical and Environmental Engineering Research Group (GIQA; www.giqa.es). His research activity has been focused on the development of catalysts with enhanced accessibility (hierarchical zeolites, mesostructured materials) applied to different processes involving bulky compounds such as catalytic cracking and hydroreforming of plastics, olefin metathesis and oligomerization, olefin polymerization, hydrodeoxygenation and hydrodecarboxylation of fatty acids. Lately, he is working on the catalytic upgrading of lignin to chemicals and methane dry reforming. Additionally, he has also started to work recently in the renewable energy field, concretely in the thermochemical heat storage on CaO-based pellets for concentrated solar power (CSP). His research has been funded by 18 public projects and 13 contracts with enterprises, being main researcher in some of them. Finally, this research has been acknowledged with an h-index of 37 in the JCR, with a total of 76 articles published in JCR (41 Q1). On the other hand, he has been granted with 4 research six-year terms and 1 transfer six-year term by ANECA. Additionally, he belongs to different scientific societies such as American Chemical Society (ACS), Royal Society of Chemistry (Fellow, RSC), Real Sociedad Española de Química (RSEQ), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and New York Academy of Science.

Research profiles: 

URL Web: https://gestion2.urjc.es/pdi/ver/josemaria.escola.saez

Keywords: Hierarchical zeolites; Mesostructured Materials; Plastics recycling; Biomass valorization; Thermochemical heat storage; CSP; methane dry reforming.