Luís P. Fonseca is an Associate Professor at the Department of Bioengineering (DBE) at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in the University of Lisbon (UL). He received a PhD in Biotechnology in 1995 and later a DSc in Biotechnology in 2006 at IST.

Luis Fonseca stayed for one year (1998-1999) as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Leeds, and later (2004-2005) with a Fulbright fellowship, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Chemical Engineering Department, University of California, Berkeley, USA.

Luis Fonseca has been involved in 20 research projects, 14 of which were national (6 as coordinator), 6 of which were funded by the EU (2 as PI responsible in Portugal), and, since 2024, has been the coordinator of the Polymers-5B CBE-JU project, funded by the EU. He has published more than 190 articles in international journals, holds a national and international patent, and has supervised 6 postdocs, 16 PhD students, and several M.Sc. students.

Recently, Luis Fonseca is the Coordinator of the Biocatalysis and Biotransformation Research Group (2BRG), based in the Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (iBB) at IST, on the development of bioprocesses for the valorisation of Agro/food wastes in the concept of a new Chemical Platform supplier to produce biobased monomers and bioactive compounds in the concepts of Biorefinery and Circular Economy.

Keynote talk title: From Agri-Food Residues to Sustainable Polymers based on the Polymers-5B Pathway Toward Circular Bioplastics