M.D.M. (Mar) Palmeros Parada PhD MSc

M.D.M. (Mar) Palmeros Parada PhD MSc

Profile

I am sustainability and responsible innovation researcher, fascinated by technological innovations and their role for a more sustainable and fairer society. Since March 2023 I work in the Water Management Department of the TU Delft on the responsible and sustainable recovery of resources from industrial and municipal residual water streams. Particularly, my aim is to research the question: How can the development of emerging technologies around resource recovery contribute to water and resource security, recognizing and responding to emerging societal concerns, such as environmental sustainability, distributive justice and safety? For this, I work with Responsible Innovation and Sustainability Assessments in water systems. Particularly, I work with participatory design approaches, applying methods like Value Sensitive Design, coupled with ex-ante LCA, techno-economic analyses, MFA, amongst others.

My interest in resource recovery started with my MSc thesis project on energy recovery from oat-processing residues – this was a collaboration between Lund University and a food company, and I just became thrilled with the potential of Biotechnology to produce useful things out of waste. Then, as a Process Design Engineer, I worked in a venture with Malaysian partners for the valorisation of palm oil residues, and as a part of Photanol, I developed and evaluated full-scale processes based on the company's technological platform: modified cyanobacteria to convert CO2 and light into a plethora of biobased products. As I worked on these projects,  questions about the sustainability of bio-based processes led me to pursue a PhD on the sustainable design of biorefineries, which I developed as part of a BE-BASIC Foundation flagship project. For this, I took a Responsible Innovation perspective, seeking to open the early stages biorefinery development to the participation of stakeholders (like farmers, local biomass processors and end-users), and the inclusion of their perspectives in decision making. As a postdoc researcher, I worked in the EU H2020 Water Mining project, where I collaborated with various public and private actors on the development and testing of resource recovery technologies for various water streams. For this project, I investigated emerging sustainability trade-offs and the societal desirability of the technologies. In parallel, I supervised the participatory evaluation of sustainable aviation fuels, leading to the development of technology roadmaps as part of the TRANSCEND project in collaboration with the Dutch Aerospace Centre (NLR).

​​​​​​​Along this trajectory, I have been teaching and supervising in various courses at the Biotechnology and Water Management Departments of the TU Delft, bringing insights from ongoing research to lectures, projects and assignments.

Read more

Expertise

Publications

Courses 2024

Courses 2023

Ancillary activities