Minna Hakkarainen

Development of sustainable materials from commodity products to advanced materials required for e.g. healthcare is a challenge facing our world today. This challenge includes not only production of new materials from biobased resources but also turning our waste products into new useful materials as well as making sure the materials developed have no negative impact on us or on our environment during their service life or after disposal. These challenges are the core of my research interests, which include:

●Recycling of polymers and biomass to value added products, including green chemicals, carbon nanospheres and graphene oxide, and further utilization of these products to design new functional materials

●Development, characterization and testing of degradable polymers, renewable materials, nano/biocomposites, biomedical materials and environmentally friendly plasticizers

●Degradation, environmental interaction and impact of polymeric materials

●Development of extraction methods as well as chromatographic and mass spectrometric tools for characterization of polymers and their low molecular mass compounds including additives and degradation products