HomeBio. Thiago Ouriques Machado earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2019 from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), under the supervision of Prof. Pedro Araújo and Prof. Claudia Sayer. His doctorate on bio-based polymer nanocarriers for plant protection also included a secondment to the Max-Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPIP-Germany), under the supervision of Prof. Katharina Landfester and Prof. Frederik Wurm. After working at UFSC as a postdoc, he joined the Dove Research Group in 2021 at the University of Birmingham (UK), then in 2022 he was awarded a UKRI Research Fellowship under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie funding guarantee. In the Dove group, he developed circular photopolymer resins for 3D printing. In 2025, he was a researcher at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) developing polypeptide resins in the POLINA project coordinated by Prof. Andreas Heise. Currently, he is back in Brazil as an invited researcher at FEQ/Unicamp.
Title. Sustainable Polymers Design: Biomedical, Agricultural and 3D Printing Applications.
Abstract. The concept of sustainable polymers has progressively evolved over recent decades, accompanying advancements in the field. However, materials from renewable resources, in general, still display inferior performance compared to their petrol counterparts, limited environmental degradability, and especially poor recyclability, falling short from a truly circular economy. In this sense, the biggest challenge remains reconciling the performance of polymer materials with their end-of-life. Herein, we show the design of sustainable polymer materials from bio-derived sources for biomedical, agricultural and additive manufacturing applications. Predominantly, increased attention is given to polymer networks, that generally pose as a bigger problem concerning end-of-life issues because of their covalently crosslinked structure rendering them impossible to recycle. More recently, the advent of light-assisted additive manufacturing of photopolymer resins has signalled an opportunity to improve the recyclability of polymer networks through dynamic covalent bonds that allow the complete deconstruction of the network, and thus the recovery of the resin that can be reprinted into high-resolution parts in a closed-loop recycling manner. Our resin platform is an advancement to photopolymer resin technology, which improves circularity of 3D printing processes by enabling closed-loop recycling and is adjustable to a range of thermomechanical properties.