J. (Jingxiu) Xie, Prof
Dr. ir. Jingxiu Xie (JX) is a associate professor in the Green Chemical Reaction Engineering unit of the Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen, University of Groningen. JX’s expertise is in catalysis engineering, with a focus on gas conversion and effluent gas management. These gases, which are often burned for energy or emitted as pollutants, represent an underuse resource. By developing more efficient catalytic processes, she aims to help drive the transition towards a circular carbon economy.
The research efforts of her team currently centres on two key directions, namely CO2/CO/H2 conversion to chemicals and fuels, e.g. sustainable aviation fuels, and effluent gas stream management from chemical recycling of plastics. Starting from thermodynamic considerations and reaction network analysis, her team builds on this foundation to design robust catalysts, apply reactor engineering strategies, and identify opportunities for process intensification. Her capability and interests in fixed-bed reactors range from high-throughput parallel reactor set-ups to single reactor advanced kinetic set-ups (steady state isotopic transient kinetic analysis, tapered element oscillating microbalance and co-feed transients).
JX attained her Bachelors from National University of Singapore in 2010. She accepted a scholarship from Eindhoven University of Technology to study her Masters in Chemical Engineering, and graduated cum laude in 2012. Her PhD thesis, defended in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ir. Krijn de Jong at Utrecht University, focused on Fischer-Tropsch to Olefins. From 2017 to 2019, she was a senior scientist at BasCat, a UniCat BASF Jointlab in Berlin. She was involved in various projects on catalyst development, reactor engineering and digitalization for the selective C-H activation of lower alkanes. In 2019, she returned to academia, collaborating with Professor Unni Olsbye at the University of Oslo to research zeolites for the direct conversion of CO2 into lower olefins through methanol. In 2020, she was appointed tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Groningen, where she established her own research group on catalytic processes for gas conversion.