Quality Living Through Chemurgy and Green Chemistry

After 31 years of service Dr. Peter C.K. Lau retired from the National Research Council of Canada (CNRC) having served as a Principal Research Officer and Group Head of Bioconversion and Sustainable Development at the Montreal facility, formerly known as the Biotechnology Research Institute. As an ad hoc member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Task Force on Biotechnology for Sustainable Industrial Development, in 1999 he contributed a key outreach article in American Society for Microbiology (ASM) News magazine on Industrial Sustainability through Biotechnology. Dr. Lau is presently a Distinguished Professor of the Talents Program for Foreign Experts of the Tianjin government. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the McGill University, Departments of Chemistry and Microbiology & Immunology, and a collaborating researcher of the FRQNT Center of Green Chemistry and Catalysis at McGill University. In 2011, he was a Visiting Professor of Kansai University, Osaka, Japan, as well as a Visiting Professor for Senior International Scientists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology. Dr. Lau is an editorial board member of Applied and Environmental Microbiology and Journal of Microbiological Methods. Among other national and international committees or working groups, he served as a scientific committee member of the Biorefining Conversions Network of the University of Alberta until recently. Dr. Lau’s general research interests encompass microorganisms and biocatalysts as environmental and sustainability tools, microbial genomics, and development of a strong knowledge base for the advancement of pollution control technology, green chemistry bioprocess, and applications in sustainable development. Dr. Lau received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry (steroid metabolism) from the University of Ottawa in 1980. He did a postdoctoral training at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) where he learned the ropes of molecular biology and became the first Canadian doing M13 DNA sequencing that ushered him into a lifelong career at the CNRC.