This article was written by Robert Mills of the Bioeconomy Institute
Jake Lindstrom, Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Iowa State University, has recently won two awards for his research poster on thermal deconstruction of biomass to increase monosaccharide yields. He won the best student poster award conference at TCS 2016, marking the third straight time an Iowa State student has placed in this prestigious competition. TCS 2016, the Symposium on Thermal and Catalytic Sciences for Biofuels and Biobased Products, was held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Nov. 1-3, 2016.
Lindstrom also won first place in the poster competition at the Frontiers in Biorefining conference two weeks later, in St. Simons Island, Georgia. “This second award is a particularly big win for a poster on thermochemical processing since this conference mostly attracts biological processing experts,” said Robert C. Brown, director of the Bioeconomy Institute and the Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering at Iowa State. He serves as Lindstrom’s advisor.
Lindstrom’s poster, entitled “Thermal Deconstruction of Red Oak with Subsequent Hydrolysis to Fermentable Monosaccharides,” was co-authored by Brown and Preston Gable, an engineer at BEI. He received a cash prize of $1,000 for his TCS 2016 award and $500 for his Frontiers in Biorefining win. You can view a PDF of Lindstrom’s poster as well as a list and PDFs of all BEI posters exhibited at TCS 2016. A number of BEI/Iowa State faculty, scientists, and students attended the conference.
Lindstrom is studying mechanisms and rates of fast pyrolysis but has recently been working on exploiting these thermochemical mechanisms to produce sugars from biomass. He’s from Pacifica, Calif., and earned his B.A. in chemistry from Grinnell College in Iowa.