Patricia Osseweijer Group

Patricia Osseweijer is full professor and Section Leader of “Section Biotechnology and Society. Her drive is to link technological innovation in biobased production with societal challenges to build a sustainable bioeconomy. Research interest focus on integral sustainable design of value chains, impact assessment, the role of values, trust and responsibility in achieving sustainability, stakeholder and public interaction, public opinion forming, novel designs of public communication and their relevance for policy making and ethics. In 2015 she was awarded the Royal Academy of the Netherlands distinguished Lorentz fellowship for integrating social sciences and technology.

Patricia has a PhD in science communication (Free University Amsterdam) and a Masters degree in molecular biology (Utrecht University). She was managing director of the  Public-Private Partnership ‘Kluyver Centre for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation’  and developed the Genomics and Society Programme. In 2010 she became Flagship Manager of the 12 M Euro socio-economic programme (Societal embedding of a Sustainable Biobased Society) of the Public-Private Partnership BE-Basic, a government supported consortium of 120 M Euro (2010-2017), which was extended with a chairmanship for the additional program “Economy, sustainability and policy”.

Patricia is Director of the TU Delft/BE-Basic office and program in Brazil, where she leads a Dual Degree PhD program aiming for 100 Dual Degrees in 2025 and coordinates a series of advanced courses in addition to a broad portfolio of joint research projects. Her aim is to develop novel forms of education to reach more with higher efficiency, and she was co-initiator of the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Industrial Biotechnology of TU Delft (EdX platform). She published over 90 articles, reports and papers and gave more than 125 presentations.