Florence Huynh RSC Prize Lecture

13:00 - 14:00,
Weds 25 February 2026

JX2.03 (Junction)

Dr Huynh joins us to deliver her RSC Rising Star in Industry Award Lecture.

This is a departmental lecture for all.

RSC 2025 Rising Star in Industry Prize: awarded to Dr Florence Huynh for delivering solutions to global plastic pollution, progressing technical understanding of plastic biodegradation, and developing new methods for characterising microplastics in the environment.

As vice president of innovations at Polymateria, Florence leads a team working on biotransformation technology, an innovative solution to tackle plastic pollution on land before it reaches the oceans. This is a solution for the most highly polluted forms of plastic in the world, which ensures polyolefins will fully and swiftly biodegrade in the natural environment in two years, leaving behind no microplastics or toxic substances, as well as being compatible with recycling. The technology is aimed at limiting the harm of plastic that ends up outside the waste management stream and escapes into nature.

Biography

Dr Florence Huynh is an enthusiastic French scientist with an interdisciplinary background spanning chemistry, biology and engineering – paired with a keen sense of real-world application and business impact. Her journey in science began early, joining science clubs at age 11 and later being part of the Science ac’, an outreach programme founded by Francois Taddei for high school students in disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Florence graduated from the INP-ENSIACET engineering school in Toulouse and spent a year in Germany with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service and worked at Bayer. She went on to complete a PhD focused on chemoenzymatic synthesis of sesquiterpenes, developing expertise at the chemistry–biology interface at Cardiff University.

Florence brings this scientific depth into the business world through her work at Polymateria, where she leads a team developing biodegradable plastics as vice president of innovations. Her current research interests include carbon sequestration of biodegradable materials, biodegradation and ecotoxicity of new materials, and microplastic formation and fate in the environment, but if you were to have a discussion with her you probably would hear her say that there is no such thing as a boring topic – only unexplored angles