Speaker
Prof Dr Dr h c Peter H. Seeberger, a chemist, was a tenured professor at MIT and ETH Zurich before becoming director at the Max-Planck Institute in Potsdam in 2009. Since 2021, he is in addition a Vice President of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and since 2023 the Founding Director of the Center for the Transformation of Chemistry (CTC) that received initial funding of €1.25 billion. His research spanning topics from engineering to immunology has been documented in >730 journal articles and >60 patent families and was recognized with >40 international awards. Peter Seeberger supports diamond open access publishing as the Editor-in-Chief of the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry. He is a co-founder of several successful companies.
Dr Christoph Gürtler holds a PhD in Chemistry, with postdoctoral research at MIT, and began his industrial career at Bayer AG in 1997 before transitioning to Covestro. He has held various R&D leadership roles, including Vice President for Product and Process Development and Senior Research Manager and Deputy Chair of the VAA Chemical Industry Executives. Since 2023, he leads special projects within Covestro's Innovation and Sustainability department. He chairs the Managerial Employees' Committee of Covestro since April 2022. Beyond Covestro, he is active on scientific advisory boards (e.g. Dechema, Nova Institute) and serves on the executive boards of VAA Chemistry Managers and ULA Deutscher Führungskräfteverband.
Sonja Haider drives sustainable change as the head of ChemSec’s Sustainable Finance division, championing chemical safety and greener investment strategies. She leads groundbreaking initiatives like ChemScore, which ranks global chemical companies on sustainability, and the Investors Initiative on Hazardous Chemicals, a coalition of over 75 firms managing $23 trillion in assets. With a knack for blending financial expertise and environmental vision, Sonja helps investors integrate chemical risks into their strategies and push for cleaner industries. A former advisor to EU sustainable finance policies, she’s shaped frameworks aligning finance with health and ecology in taking pollution prevention and control to the next level. Currently, she’s helping define global pollution reporting standards as part of the Global Reporting Initiative.
Isabel Thoma, Head of Impact at Hamburg-based bioeconomy scale-up traceless®, has played a key role as a founding employee in guiding the company's journey from academic research to today's industrial scale. With a background in technical product design, she combines an innovation-driven, holistic approach with practical knowledge of application markets and the principles of Design for Circularity. Having successfully established the sustainability and communications departments at traceless, she continues to lead both areas today.
Koos van Haasteren is Executive Director of Chemelot, one of Europe’s largest integrated chemical clusters. The ambition of Chemelot is to be Europe’s first fully climate neutral & circular Chemical site, contributing to European competitiveness and strategic independence with unique value chains. Koos joined the Chemical industry in 1987 and fulfilled business and Board roles in DSM and SABIC, after studying Business Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
