Robin Rogers

Dr. Robin D. Rogers is President, Owner, and Founder of 525 Solutions, Inc., in Tuscaloosa, AL USA and a Research Professor at The University of Alabama. In 2019-2020 he also served as Tage Erlander Professor at Stockholm University to help bring sustainable development to Sweden. Since 2019 he has been an Honorary Professor in the School of Engineering, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

He obtained both his B.S. in Chemistry (1978, Summa Cum Laude) and his Ph.D. in Chemistry (1982) at The University of Alabama before starting his professorial career at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL where he rose through the ranks to become Presidential Research Professor. In 1996, he returned to UA as a Professor where he held various titles including Director of the Center for Green Manufacturing (1998-2014), Distinguished Research Professor (2004-2014), and Robert Ramsay Chair of Chemistry (2005-2014). In 2007, he was also Chair of Green Chemistry and Co-Director of QUILL at The Queen’s University of Belfast in Northern Ireland (UK) before returning full time to UA from 2009-2014. In 2015, he became Canada Excellence Research Chair in Green Chemistry and Green Chemicals at McGill University in Montreal, QC, Canada, where he remained until 2017, when he returned full time to the start-up company he founded in 2004 to accelerate the introduction of academic advances in sustainable development directly to Society.

Rogers holds 33 issued patents (plus numerous foreign equivalents) of which 17 are licensed and has published over 878 papers on a diverse array of topics. His research interests cover the use of ionic liquids and Green Chemistry for sustainable technology through innovation and include Materials (advanced polymeric and composite materials from biorenewables), Separations (novel strategies for separation and purification of value added products from biomass), Energy (new energetic materials and selective separations), and Medicine (elimination of waste while delivering improved pharmaceutical performance). Most recently he has embarked on an effort to utilize biorenewable polymers such as chitin and cellulose in an effort to eliminate the need for synthetic plastics.